[no subject]

I have tried to contact C-Cube through various channels in an attempt to
obtain information about the ZiVA-DS chipset but have hit dead ends every
time. Anyone inside the US is encouraged to persue this. Being in
Australia has made things difficult.

I have also seen a couple of reports from Linux developers that C-Cube
have refused to give them programming information because it is
"proprietry" and not for public distribution.

I am not sure on the legalities yet, but I plan to make an attempt at
trying to reverse engineer/trace parts of the Creative windows DVD player
to see if it is possible to derive enough information about the ZiVA-DS
decoder to proceed with the project.

For the moment, reverse engineering is the only option. I don't know what
the legalities are yet, but the result of such an effort would be an adhoc
programming spec. Which would be used to implement a clean room device
driver for FreeBSD. I know that the UK have "product compatability"
related laws that make reversing legal.

I am still learning a lot of new stuff as I investigate this (mostly about
the internals of windows). DVD support fgor FreeBSD is a commercial sized
project. Things that need to be done before DVD will happen on FreeBSD
includes UDF support, CSS key negotiation support in the ATAPI CDROM
driver, Dxr2 video overlay driver, Dxr2 TV/Out driver, C-Cube ZiVA-DS
driver, implementation of a full DVD navigator.

I would be interested to discuss this with anyone interested in commencing
with such a project.

Seeya...Q

               -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
                        
                          _____  /      Quinton Dolan - q@xxxxxxxxxx
  __  __/  /   /   __/   /      /          Systems Administrator
     /    __  /   _/    /      /            Fast Access Network
  __/  __/ __/ ____/   /   -  /          Gold Coast, QLD, Australia
                    _______  /              Ph: +61 7 5574 1050
                           \_\                 SAGE-AU Member



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