what are these dongle's?

[mykeparker]

I have been reading about the new gbpvr.bin thats under development. I can use some guess to say its something to do with the connection to the MVP. But what more does it do? I'm just rather interested and like to know why for example is this being developed to eventually not use teh default dongle.bin?

Its obviously nothing important to get an answer so no rush, but would still like some more details. (I'm a bit of a geek for wanting to know why I use something)

[sub]

The dongle is effectively the software that runs on the MVP.

dongle.bin is the original software written by Hauppauge. GBPMVP.bin is written by me. I created this for several reasons:

• so I could get more visibility of the cause when errors happen. Often with dongle.bin, the MVP would just disconnect, and I'd have no way to know for sure why this happened. With GBMVP.BIN, I can find out why it is disconnecting if I need to.
  
• so I could provide features not offered by the original Hauppauge software. I've already added a couple of significant enhancements, video in a window and cleaner shutdown. These would not have been possible with the original Hauppauge dongle.
  
• so I can implement speed improvements. Hauppauge screens are much simpler, so they did not have a problem with speed. I need to change the communication protocol to find slightly faster ways to get the screens to the MVP.
  

[mykeparker]

thanks for the reply!

[A_Brass]

Sub, was the video in a window implemented only in the the most recent (maintance) release or was it in the one previous (96.8) ?

[sub]

It was first implemented in v0.96.8, but there have been several stability improvements added in v0.96.12

[User]

It was in 96.08 then improved upon in the maintenance.

[cginzel]

Sub... just a few more technical details... the MVP runs linux on a PPC, so what do you use to create the dongle? and did you have to sign some kind of non-disclosure agreement to get details on how to write the dongle?