FireDTV and FloppyDTV FireWire DVB receivers
External IEEE-1394 (FireWire) digital TV tuner boxes sold by the Austrian company Digital Everywhere under the FireDTV and FloppyDTV brands, used in the mid-2000s to receive DVB-S, DVB-C, and DVB-T broadcasts on PCs and set-top devices over a FireWire cable.
recommendation
A candidate for future removal because the Austrian vendor Digital Everywhere shut down in 2009 and these external FireWire TV tuners have not been sold new for over fifteen years. Upstream activity is minimal — the only recent touch was a sweeping treewide hardening patch, not real maintenance — but since no other in-kernel driver covers this hardware, outright removal would strand the remaining hobbyist users, so deprecation and clearer documentation of its legacy status is the safer near-term path.
repository signals
sources
- lore.kernel.org
Recent lore activity touching firedtv-fw.c in 2025 was part of a broad treewide overflow-hardening patch spanning 85 files, not focused maintenance of this driver.
- cateee.net
LKDDb maps CONFIG_DVB_FIREDTV to drivers/media/firewire/Kconfig and identifies the supported hardware as FireDTV and FloppyDTV IEEE-1394 DVB receivers.
- nordichardware.se
Digital Everywhere announced it was shutting down in 2009 and FireDTV/FloppyDTV products would disappear from the market, indicating the hardware family has been out of new production for many years.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Real driver directory: firedtv FireWire DVB receiver driver. Chipset/family name comes from in-tree Kconfig plus LKDDb page obtained via web search. Upstream attention looks minimal: lore_file_timeline/lore_activity on firedtv-fw.c found only sparse recent touches, with the newest cited lore URL being a 2025 treewide patch rather than device-specific work. Web search found a 2009 report that vendor Digital Everywhere shut down, so new-hardware sales in 2025 are implausible; remaining use is likely legacy hobbyist/industrial installs only. No natural upstream replacement driver covers the same external IEEE-1394 tuner hardware, so removal is riskier than deprecation; no concrete removal thread was established.