Some days everything is tough to do. Other days everything is easy.
About a year and a half ago I was under the impression that you would need the microcode to use the board. But this isn't so. You only need to load it once using the Xilinx application and you're good to go.
OK, so if you only have a Linux box, how does this help you? At the time it all seemed terribly mysterious to me, but today I think that you might be further ahead reprogramming the chip using your own open firmware, if it becomes a problem with distribution.
Somebody who knew what he was doing could probably even improve on or simplify Hauppauge's design. It is all reprogrammable anyway, so there's nothing to lose by, for instance, trying to run the transport stream directly from the demodulator to the sound channel, as a full-fledged DStream card would do.
"But I don't know if either will connect with Ravisent."
Neither do I. But Ravisent will connect just fine to the MPEG splitter, so I guess it's a case of emulating that. Some channels seemed to work better than others. CBS @ 1080i worked flawlessly (Wintop showed between 3-15% free CPU). Others less so.
"Is it only old releases that will do this? Others have said similar things about older ATI Radeon drivers, that the new ones no longer seem to support this as well."
I don't know. This is a filter that I picked up when beta testing the TT player. I didn't go down the software decoding path, but still had the filter lying around on my system.