[rescue] Re: SunTuner?

[Chris Powell]

On Mon, 13 Jan 2003 19:58:03 -0800 (PST), Skeezics Boondoggle wrote:

> On Mon, 13 Jan 2003, Bill Bradford wrote:
> 
> > > (A search of the public and contract collections turns up one mention
> > > in the SunLabs part of the site, and two old bug reports - one from
> > > 1994, the other from 1996.  This must not have ever been productized?)
> > 
> > It was - I see them on ebay from time to time.  LIke the Sun Interface
> > Converter (lets you use ps2 kb and mice), it just wasnt
> > advertised/promoted much.
> > 
> > (more use *within* Sun than anywhere else, I think)
> 
> Huh.  That's cool.  Info seems to be very scarce, though.  I'm guessing
> there was software that talked over the serial port to change settings and
> things; that's probably hard to find, unless maybe the ShowMe stuff knows
> about this device?  Figuring out the protocol by poking around a bit over
> the serial port shouldn't be terribly hard, but time consuming...

If you do a google search for Sun Tuner, it'll take you straight to the
software download - source code and all! This allows you to drive the
tuner - change channel etc. - through a serial port. Some things don't
work as the tuner hard/software seems to be half finished. The software
source code refers to region versions, but I think there was only a US
NTSC version (though 'Sun Express' in the UK definitely marketed the Sun
Tuner, it's in several old catalogues). My US-sourced Sun Tuner is
modified to work in the UK by changing the tuner module. As a TV tuner,
it's pretty neat. ShowMe does not control the Sun Tuner.

You will need a video capture card to view the video on a Sun.
I never managed to get video and audio to stay in sync using a
SunVideo card (SBus and PCI versions) with the simple driver or
ShowMeTV. After a while, video and audio were quite some seconds
out of sync. I read that this was due to the compression I was
using, but trying everything

With ShowMeTV it's possible to have the Sun Tuner picture transmitted
around the Sun Network - this is really, *really* cool, but not



ChrisP.