DVB, ATSC, and ISDB digital TV frontend demodulators and tuners
A large collection of demodulator and tuner chip drivers for digital television reception, covering DVB-S/S2 satellite, DVB-T/T2 terrestrial, DVB-C cable, ATSC over-the-air, and ISDB hardware from vendors like Montage, MaxLinear, Silicon Labs, and Panasonic. These chips sit inside USB sticks and PCIe capture cards used for TV viewing and recording, with new products still shipping in 2025.
recommendation
It should stay because this is an active, broadly used collection covering dozens of digital TV demodulator and tuner chips that ship in USB and PCIe TV capture cards still sold in 2025, including products like the Hauppauge WinTV-dualHD. The directory saw 135 substantive commits from 56 authors in the last five years, with changes as recent as October 2025, and there is no single replacement subsystem that could absorb its role.
repository signals
sources
- git.kernel.org
Upstream Kconfig still exposes a large set of selectable DVB frontend drivers, including newer families such as Montage M88DS3103, MaxLinear MxL5xx, STV0910, Panasonic MN88473, and Silicon Labs SI2165.
- hauppauge.com
Hauppauge still lists multiple current TV tuner products, indicating ongoing new-device availability in the TV-tuner market that depends on Linux media/DVB frontend support.
- hauppauge.com
The WinTV-dualHD product page markets a currently sold ATSC/QAM USB tuner and explicitly mentions Linux/Plex usage, showing continued real-world deployment of supported frontend hardware.
- hauppauge.com
The vendor webstore shows the WinTV-dualHD actively offered for sale, reinforcing that at least some supported tuner hardware remained commercially available in 2025.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Not a single obsolete chip driver but an active aggregate directory for many DVB/ATSC demodulator+tuner chips. lore_file_timeline on the directory prefix returned no matches, so I treated that as a directory-level blind spot rather than inactivity; I then relied on the provided history metadata (135 substantive commits in 5y, 56 authors, latest substantive touch 2025-10-17) and local Kconfig inspection via exec_command. Web search returned Hauppauge product and webstore URLs showing current tuner sales and Linux-facing usage. No evidence found of an upstream removal/deprecation push for the directory as a whole, and there is no single replacement driver for this mixed frontend stack.