HiDes is a company from Taiwan, a manufacturer of cheap DVB-T devices. These devices are based on chips from ITE Technologies Inc., also from Taiwan.
The UT-100C model is a USB DVB-T modulator adaptor (transmission). This device is probably the cheapest modulator on Earth for Digital TV. Other models include reception or PCIe interface.
The associated software, as currently delivered by HiDes, supports Windows and Linux. It is currently unclear who actually developed this software, HiDes or ITE.
The software is poorly packaged and its delivery mostly consists in a set of disorganized zip archives on DropBox, without fixed URL to reference in order to get notified of updates.
This project proposes an integrated packaging of the drivers for HiDes devices on Linux and Windows.
The latest repackaged drivers are available here.
Synthetic links to the latest versions are also available from the TSDuck site.
The original packaging for the Windows driver for HiDes devices is acceptable. No change was made. This project only provides a fixed and known place from where the latest version can be downloaded.
The original Linux driver has two problems:
- It is delivered in source form only, in the middle of an archive containing sample test code and other software.
- It has a polling design for send operations. A "normal" device driver for output device implements "waiting" or "blocking" send operations.
To solve the first issue, a DKMS (Dynamic Kernel Module Support) package is
provided in this project. Install the DMKS package (available in .rpm or
.deb form) and the driver is automatically recompiled and reinstalled after
each kernel upgrade.
To solve the second issue, the Linux driver was modified to make all write
operations waiting for the device to be ready. Thus, applications do not
have to implement polling.
Note that the modified driver remains otherwise compatible with the original
one. Thus, applications which were developed for the original driver will
continue to work. But their polling code will never be used since all write
calls always succeed the first time (except in case of real errors of course).
To let applications checking if the driver needs polling or not, the version
string of the new driver ends with a 'w' letter.
The original SDK is hopeless. The API definition is not even the same between Linux and Windows. It is not possible to write portable applications using the original SDK. Moreover, the Linux version of the SDK exhibits blatant memory leaks in its so-called "API". Using the original SDK is consequently discouraged.
An alternate portable HiDes API is provided as part of TSDuck. This API is the C++ class HiDesDevice. The interface of this class is system-agnostic. Its implementation directly calls the underlying device driver but hides the differences between operating systems.
- UT-100 USB DVB-T modulator adaptor product page
- Latest software downlinks (browse to "Peripheral Transceiver / Transmitter / Receiver", table "DVB-T", column "Transmitter", then "UT-100C")