Crowdfund new drivers for Brooktree, ViXS capture chips?
 

I assume most or at least many of us are familiar with the Conexant Brooktree series of analog video and audio/video capture chips which were used for many years on various devices.

I've yet to discover any way of getting any of them to work in Windows 8 or 10. Some can be made to work in Windows 7, if you can find a signed driver that happens to work with the USB or PCI device you have, or in a few rare cases the manufacturer of the device released drivers for Vista.

Going forward a few years, HP, Compaq and other OEMs sold millions of Media Center PCs with ViXS PureTV PCIe x1 cards with S-Video input and various inputs for digital and analog broadcast and cable TV. From my own attempts and lots of searching the web, it appears that there is flat out no way to make them work with any version of Windows after Vista. There are drivers that will install and "work" but no PVR, live TV or other such software acknowledges they exist.

The ViXS cards seem to be "attached at the hip" to Windows Media Center on XP and Vista. None of the OEMs (that I've been able to find) shipped any other software to use with the cards.

Creating a driver for the Brooktree chips for newer Windows versions may be easier because someone has already done much of the work, and the source code is available. BtWinCap http://btwincap.sourceforge.net/ Unfortunately it only works on Windows 98 Second Edition and Windows Millennium (32bit only) and Windows 2000 and XP (32bit or 64bit).

Porting that to Windows Vista through 10 would bring a large amount of equipment back to being usable. But how much would it cost to get it done? What's required to have it digitally signed so it can be installed in newer Windows versions without resorting to completely and permanently disabling driver signing?

For the ViXS based cards, all there is to work with are the publicly available drivers - unless ViXS could be persuaded to help out with technical information.