Conexant CX2388x PCI TV tuner and video capture cards
A large family of PCI TV tuner, analog video capture, and DVB/ATSC receiver cards built around Conexant's CX23880-series decoder chips, popular in consumer and hobbyist PCs from roughly 2003 through the late 2000s. The same silicon also lives on in niche modern PCIe-bridged capture cards used for archiving analog video and tape formats.
recommendation
Worth keeping but documenting its niche because the underlying PCI tuner cards are largely a 2000s-era product line, yet the code is still receiving real fixes (a PAL-Nc correction in 2022, DMA API modernisation in 2021) and a small specialist community continues to buy CX2388x-based analog capture cards in 2024-2025. Mainstream deployments have moved on to the CX23885 successor and other PCIe parts, so a note flagging cx88 as a legacy generation would help future maintainers without justifying removal today.
repository signals
sources
- lore.kernel.org
Upstream still accepted a functional cx88 fix in 2022 ('media: cx88: Fix PAL-Nc standard'), so the driver is not abandoned.
- lore.kernel.org
cx88 also received API-maintenance work in 2021 ('switch from pci_ to dma_ API'), indicating continued tree health work rather than removal.
- cateee.net
LKDDb shows CONFIG_VIDEO_CX88 still present in current kernel series and identifies the family as Conexant 2388x / PCI video-audio decoder hardware.
- linuxtv.org
Linux media documentation lists many cx88-supported PCI TV/DVB/ATSC boards and labels cx23885 as a successor, placing cx88 in an older pre-PCIe capture/tuner generation.
- github-wiki-see.page
Modern niche CX2388x-derived cards are still sold with PCIe bridge chips for specialist analog-capture use, implying some new hardware availability remains but outside mainstream deployments.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Local source inspection (`rg`, `sed`) identified this as the Conexant 2388x TV/capture stack with many legacy PCI board tables. `lore_activity` on `cx88-core.c` surfaced a real functional fix in 2022 and maintenance in 2021 via the cited lore URLs; sampled lore did not show clear removal momentum. Web search found LKDDb and LinuxTV docs confirming the chipset family is still supported upstream but tied to an older PCI tuner/capture ecosystem, while the cxadc wiki suggests only niche new sales in 2024-2025. That supports `keep-annotate`: legacy hardware with low present-day deployment, but not dead enough for deprecation/removal.