Media Subsystem Changes Head Into Linux 4.16: NVIDIA Tegra Decoder, Xbox One TV Tuner

While the Linux 4.16 merge window is nearing the end of the line, there still are some feature updates still being sent in, including a big batch of media subsystem changes sent in on Tuesday.

Mauro Carvalho Chehab sent in the media updates and they include a rather large smothering of improvements. Highlights of this media pull request include:

- Support for the Xbox One Digital TV Tuner, a USB 2.0 TV tuner that supports DVB-T/DVB-T2/DVB-C broadcasts. There is though some firmware required for the demodulator that can be downloaded but isn't distributed at this time by linux-firmware.git.

- A new media staging driver for the NVIDIA Tegra video decoder. NVIDIA's Tegra 20/30/114/124/132 SoCs have a dedicated video decoder engine for H.264 / MPEG-4 / WMV / VC-1 video codecs. This initial driver implements H.264 for Tegra20 (the old Tegra 2). Hopefully we will see this driver extended for more formats and for newer Tegra SoCs, but for now at least this VDE decode driver has been tested to work on hardware like the Toshiba AC100 and Acer A500. From user-space this new driver can be paired with the libvdpau-tegra code for in turn working with any Linux multimedia application supporting VDPAU.

- A new driver, ov7740, for the OV7740 VGA CMOS image sensor.

- A new MIPI CSI2 driver for V4L2 with the hardware being used by some Intel SoCs.

- A new tda18250 driver for the NXP TDA18250 tuner.

- All LIRC staging drivers have been dropped.

- Video 4 Linux now supports the UVC metadata format and the uvcvideo code supports the extensible device information and metadata device node.

The lengthy list of media changes for Linux 4.16 can be found via this kernel mailing list message.