August 14, 2000. Linux driver for Miro/Pinnacle Systems Inc. DC10plus and some DC10 cards. Release candidate. Homepage: http://www.cicese.mx/~mirsev/Linux/DC10plus This is a driver for DC10plus capture cards from Pinnacle Systems Inc. It also works with many old Miro DC10 cards with SAA7110A TV decoder and ADV7176 TV encoder (please, make sure that your card has these chips, otherwise the driver will not work). The driver is Video4Linux compliant and contains extensions to provide hardware support for full motion MJPEG compression and decompression. Since this driver is a derivative from the driver for Buz Iomega cards written by Dr. Rainer Johanni, http://www.johanni.de/munich-vision/buz/ they both have compatible API. I hope that this API will become a standard. At least, there is another driver, for LML33 cards, which shares the same API: http://www.mlb.org/ Formats supported by DC10plus driver: PAL/SECAM: up to 768x576 at 25 full frames per second; NTSC: up to 640x480 at 30 full frames per second. The JPEG compression ratio is adjustable, so the data rate can be varied from 6-7 MBytes/s down to 1-2 MBytes/s depending on the required image quality. Hardware compression Since the card provides hardware compression, even low end machines can be successfully used for movie capture and playback. I've tested the driver with 2.2.14 kernel running on 233 MHz Pentium MMX with 64M RAM on 430TX motherboard and with 10GB IDE drive from Western Digital Corp. On one test run I've got 0 frames dropped during about 20 minutes of full motion NTSC (I live in Mexico) video capture with fully synchronized audio. The command was lavrec -fa -in -d1 -l -1 -q30 -w /dos/g/capture/Linux/test%03d.avi for recording, and lavplay -n128 /dos/g/capture/Linux/test*.avi for playback. (See lavtools distribution for more information). Typical run of similar test can provide as few as 6-8 dropped frames per half of an hour. You mileage may vary, though. Compilation and installation Please, read file README regarding compilation and installation issues. Note, that you will need mem=XXX setting in lilo.conf, or bigphysarea patch only if you are planning to use uncompressed motion or still capture using XawTV and other programs. If you use only MJPEG compressed capture provided by the driver, you should not need large memory areas for DMA. In this case, you will be able to capture and playback movies with lavtools, however you will not be able to use capture features of XawTV and other similar programs (you can still watch video on the screen). Tested applications: XawTV to watch video on your computer monitor. kwintv the same (you might need to use option lock_norm=1, see the description in Changes section below). lavtools To record and playback AVI or Quicktime files. Note: you will need patched version, lavtools-1.2p2 to support new features of this driver. Please visit driver homepage for more info. Broadcast2000 reportedly (I didn't try that) can accept movies recorded by lavrec for editing and then edited movie can be played back by lavplay program. MainActor 3.53 also can accept movies recorded by lavrec for editing. Changes in v0.4: 1. Now the driver (with new lavtools-1.2p2) is able to deal with cropped TV clips produced by miro/Pinnacle software. Try new lavplay on clips which you couldn't play before. 2. For software developers: now the driver returns maxwidth and maxheight parameters according to the current TV standard (norm). Therefore, the software which communicates with the driver and "asks" for these parameters should first set the correct norm. Well, it seems logically correct: TV standard is "more constant" for current country than geometry settings of a variety of TV capture cards which may work in ITU or square pixel format. Remember that users now you can lock the norm (see item 3 below) to avoid any ambiguity. 3. Two new parameters have been added for the driver configuration on loading: lock_norm=1 will disable TV standard switching but will not produce any error response to the application trying to change norm. lock_norm=2 will disable changing TV standard but it will also return error to the application attempting to switch norm. It can be useful with applications like XawTV which switch norm at the beginning to find out which TV standards are available. This feature can be useful in combination with default_norm parameter to lock the norm for current country and prevent it from switching by some not well behaving programs. Default is 0, i.e. switching is enabled, however I would recommend to always lock the norm unless you are dealing with different TV standards. pass_through=0 will enable TV output only when the device is in use by some program. Otherwise, the TV monitor will show a standard color bar. pass_through=1 will enable passing of input TV signal to the output. Default is 0. 4. Interrupt processing code was modified to make the driver working even after codec crash. It should greatly improve the driver reliability. I've tested switching channels on the VCR which was used as video signal source during recording with lavrec, and the driver survived the switch and other glitches in the signal, restarting and continuing capture. Some frames in the clip were corrupted but they can be cut by video editing software. The driver also survives corrupted frames during playback. 5. The driver now is able to play MJPEG files on the computer monitor screen simultaneously with playing on the attached TV monitor. However, there is only one utility which can provide such functionality: mplay_screen from examples directory of buz-1.0.1 driver distribution. It plays files in its own format which must be recorded by mrecord from the same distribution. This is a proprietary format, incompatible with AVI format. Nevertheless, now the driver is almost ready for applications which will play AVI files on the computer screen. Please, see item 7 below for other experimental feature. 6. SECAM support. The driver now provides partial support for SECAM TV standard used in Russia and some other countries from former Soviet Union. Probably, this standard is also used in France but I'm not sure of this. The partial (not full) support means that the driver can accept color SECAM signal for capture, so users from these countries can record clips and watch video on the computer monitor screen using XawTV or similar application in full color, but the image on the attached TV monitor during the capture can be B&W or with messed up colors. Note, however, that this will be only during capture. The playback of the captured clip will be in PAL standard and with full color! So, now users from Russia and other countries with SECAM standard can watch TV programs and capture clips from broadcast channels. Of course, since DC10plus does not have built-in tuner, you will need to take the signal from your VCR, TV or other source with external tuner. 7. Now the driver can to be used by two programs at the same time (please, see warning note below regarding this feature). Using XawTV you can watch what you are recording or playing back with lavtools. I've tested the following sequence and it worked for me: * start xawtv and switch inputs, TV standards, and adjust video (contrast, saturation, etc.). You may also run your favorite audio mixer application to adjust audio inputs. * run lavrec with options: -i<set your input and norm here> (to choose proper input and TV standard) -l -1 (to use audio mixer settings) Other lavrec option can be added at your choice. * watch the movie in xawtv window while recording it as AVI or Quicktime file. * when recording is finished, run lavplay or xlav and watch your clip in xawtv window. * Note: you should not quit xawtv during recording or playing back. If you quit xawtv during recording or playback, another lavtools program will stop and may even crash. I'm not sure that the same will work for you. You can try but, please, be careful. WARNING! This is an experimental feature and I'm not sure if it will be supported in the future. The driver was not designed to be used like this and it has no protection against any interference between two running programs. THEREFORE, IT IS POTENTIALLY DANGEROUS AND SINCE THE DRIVER OPERATES IN KERNEL SPACE, USING THIS FEATURE MAY CRASH YOUR ENTIRE SYSTEM. 8. /proc/buz0 entry: using 'cat /proc/buz0' you can see the contents of ZR36057/67 chip registers. It is also possible to modify the contents of some registers directly. WARNING: modified contents is not stored in the driver memory, if you restart any program which uses this driver or even change position or cause redraw of a window of xawtv or other program, the original registers contents will be restored by the driver. However, it can be used to change ZR36067 registers on the fly for fine tuning and then to include these changes into driver code. This feature is very limited and still requires some documentation. However, if you are impatient, look at buz_procfs.c code and (IMPORTANT!) read ZR36057/67 manual. To set TopField bit, for example, you need to type as root: echo TopField=1 > /proc/buz0 If you use this feature and have found some interesting result, please, let me know. I've tested the driver with 2.2.14 kernel. There is still no support for new i2c subsystem from newer kernels. If someone wants to add it, please do. I will appreciate that. Please, try the driver, and let me know if something is wrong. It would be nice if you fix something and send me a patch. To download the driver and for other news and updates, please, visit http://www.cicese.mx/~mirsev/Linux/DC10plus Good luck. -- Serguei Miridonov mirsev@xxxxxxxxx
