Thanks to Oliver Schwartz and a late night driver debugging session, we may see both Focus and HDTV/ X2VGA support very very soon. The console slowdown issues are gone, and the reason for the strange purple tinge has been found (a register was being set to 0x98 instead of 0x9c which meant that the conexant encoder was expecting an RGB signal instead of YCrCb). With these bugs gone, the driver should be stable and usable. I'll run some tests after I compile a new kernel with the fixes.

The bad news is that kernel 2.4.24 still has the same bug as 2.4.23, under heavy load it will suddenly Oops and complain about the journal - I'm still not sure exactly what the problem is (maybe to do with the filesystem?). I'll see what I can do about it though!

Update:
Right now, in front of me, I have Gentoox running at 1024x768 on top of 480p on an LCD monitor with pinsharp definition, thanks to the fixed video drivers and to my X2VGA! Together with this I have a mouse and keyboard so, all in all, I'm basically sat in front of a full computer! Don't expect a patch until this weekend - maybe next because I just started University again today so I need to get settled back into the routine :/

This patch will also take a long time to develop since I need to add a lot of new stuff to xbvset, though the kernel patch is ready to go now (and it has focus support - 640x480 only!). xbvset will incorporate some code from dmp of xbox-linux which detects which video encoder type you have (Conexant/ Focus) and deliver the appropriate options. Really, a complete rewrite of xbvset is needed and this will take a lot of hard work.

I probably will add the new kernel to magic (a patched up 2.4.22) as soon as I've tested it for a while.