Hi Matt, To start, check out http://www.linuxmediaarts.com/ for a company selling an SDI card that seems supported under linux, along with some other 'high end' goodies. But the cost is prohibitively expensive to end-users, since we're not the market. Matt G. (matt_g_@xxxxxxxxxxx): > I've been unsuccessful in my search for info on linux hardware support > for studio-grade, uncompressed capture/playback. Is there anything > along the lines of Matrox Digisuite supported under V4L or V4L2? How > about SDI? Have any manufacturers provided sufficient information to > support these products? > How about manufacturers that have refused to provide this info? Even if manufacturers provided this information, what linux developer could a) afford the cards, or b) have equipment to use them? I know I'd love to have a matrox digisuite to maybe play with MPEG encoding, compositing for my PVR, field-correct video output with a nice API, I mean the stuff is awesome under windows, but I know that I can't afford the hardware and if I could did write a driver, I'd be the only user! > Another concern I have is the API. Are the V4L-related APIs > sufficient to build a professional-grade NLE? I don't really care > about realtime DVEs, or anything like that - I mainly care about audio > synch, timecode/genlock, and realtime capture/playback of > uncompressed. Deck control is another huge issue, but also not a > primary concern of mine. Well the V4L2 API (http://www.thedirks.org/v4l2/) is supposedly good enough for what it wants to do: provide an API to consumer-level video equipment. It has support for timecode, but I don't think anything implements that (but you can read VBI data and correlate it with video frames, and I wrote a timecode decoder for this API). The API has no support for controlling genlocks, like if you wanted to genlock two outputs or something, but what consumer cards can do this anyway, and nothing yet supports the TV output API! Audio sync is a bit funny, what hardware did you want to support? The V4L2 API doesn't speak at all about audio, but I'm not sure what hardware you'd be talking about here anyway. For field-correct output sync is also a bit weird, but again nothing supports the TV output API, so I think this is mostly untested. I believe that most developers aren't actively rushing to get any of this done either. I hang out with most of the linux DVD developer types, and we of course want to get field-correct output working at some point for playing DVDs nicely, but most developers are too busy getting things to look nice on their monitors to worry about TV output much. For people into recording, they're also not overly concerned with recording. Most PVR efforts etc focus on recording every second field at low resolution, like 253x240@xxxxxxxxx That doesn't mean we don't care about quality, but I don't see a big push to get some of the more higher-end code done, even on our consumer grade hardware. Most users/developers of V4L seem to just want simple PVR apps or watching half-speed 25/29.97fps TV in a little window. > Is there any chance of this happening, or is this too much at odds > with the other problems V4L is trying to address? Are there other > projects aimed at getting linux into the post/broadcast environments? Since most developers aren't working on V4L professionally, I don't see why we'd want to target the post/broadcast environments. Sure people want to write NLEs for editing their home videos, but few developers are writing films or authoring TV shows. I can say that I for one like quality and try to write apps that are professional in how they handle video and stuff, but my userbase right now is definitely not movie or TV studios, it's just myself and my friends on IRC. I bet most other developers are in the same boat: writing software for linux users, not to try to push linux to companies. > Note: I would be willing to contribute code & documentation to driver > or API projects in line with the above goals. I have no (current) > commercial interests in this, BTW. So you're a home user and you want to do what? There are a bunch of people trying to do NLE projects, fix up broadcast2000, etc. Lots of interest. But I'm not sure about this 'post/broadcast environment' thing. -- Billy Biggs vektor@xxxxxxxxxxxx
