• Mike Isely's avatar
    V4L/DVB (13170): bttv: Fix reversed polarity error when switching video standard · 2de26c0a
    Mike Isely authored
    The bttv driver function which handles switching of the video standard
    (set_tvnorm() in bttv-driver.c) includes a check which can optionally
    also reset the cropping configuration to a default value.  It is
    "optional" based on a comparison of the cropcap parameters of the
    previous vs the newly requested video standard.  The comparison is
    being done with a memcmp(), a function which only returns a true value
    if the comparison actually fails.
    
    This if-statement appears to have been written to assume wrong
    memcmp() semantics.  That is, it was re-initializing the cropping
    configuration only if the new video standard did NOT have different
    cropcap values.  That doesn't make any sense.  One definitely should
    reset things if the cropcap parameters are different - if there's any
    comparison to made at all.
    
    The effect of this problem was that a transition from, say, PAL to
    NTSC would leave in place old cropping setup that made sense for the
    PAL geometry but not for NTSC.  If the application doesn't care about
    cropping it also won't try to reset the cropping configuration,
    resulting in an improperly cropped video frame.  In the case I was
    testing this actually caused black video frames to be displayed.
    
    Another interesting effect of this bug is that if one does something
    which does NOT change the video standard and this function is run,
    then the cropping setup gets reset anyway - again because of the
    backwards comparison.  It turns out that just running anything which
    merely opens and closes the video device node (e.g. v4l-info) will
    cause this to happen.  One can argue that simply opening the device
    node and not doing anything to it should not mess with any of its
    state - but because of this behavior, any TV app which does such
    things (e.g. xawtv) probably therefore doesn't see the problem.
    
    The solution is to fix the sense of the if-statement.  It's easy to
    see how this mistake could have been made given how memcmp() works.
    The patch is therefore removal of a single "!" character from the
    if-statement in set_tvnorm in bttv-driver.c.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarMike Isely <isely@pobox.com>
    CC: stable@kernel.org
    Signed-off-by: default avatarMauro Carvalho Chehab <mchehab@redhat.com>
    2de26c0a
bttv-driver.c 120 KB