Hauppauge cards for capture / playback

[Kit Peters]

I'm building a replay system that is currently based around a Hauppauge WinTV PVR500 for capture, and a WinTV PVR350 for playback.  How well will those cards work in openreplay?  Will I be able to utilize the PVR500's hardware MPEG encoding capability?  What about the 350's hardware MPEG decoder?

KP

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Kit Peters, W0KEH
GPG public key fingerpint: 1A12 04B6 0C80 306A B292  14FD 2C7A 1037 F666 46A7

[Andrew Armenia]

Hi Kit,

Currently, only the DeckLink line of cards from Blackmagic Design are supported for output, mainly because that's what I've been using. Devices supported by Video4Linux are supported for input, so your PVR500 may be supported; I'd suggest checking out their wiki at http://linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/Supported_Hardware. I have no idea how difficult it would be to code up support for a Video4Linux output device, if that card is supported. The playout code can be configured to output raw video frames to standard output, so if you can find a program that will pipe from standard input to your card, you may be in business.

As far as hardware MPEG encoding goes... openreplay won't use it, instead it will capture raw video and encode in software to M-JPEG. Using an intraframe codec makes things a lot simpler, and I don't see myself writing MPEG support anytime soon. If you have a processor that supports SSE instructions, you will gain a significant performance boost by using libjpeg-turbo in place of your system's default libjpeg. 

You may want to check out some of my more recent work over at http://github.com/exavideo/exacore. This code may be a bit more tricky to get up and running, but it's a bit better structured than the old version, so it should be easier to add support for new inputs and outputs. I've been using it in a 1080i HD-SDI environment, so there may be a few places still where 1920x1080 is hard coded. The new version also supports input devices other than the keyboard, such as Contour Design's USB shuttle controllers. Documentation on the new stuff is still VERY spotty though.

Lastly, I recently set up a (very small) company with the goal of continuing development and providing support for openreplay, and developing the second-generation system I just mentioned. I'm not sure what your needs are, but I could be willing to develop support for additional cards for a reasonable fee, and release the resulting code as open source software. If that is something that would be of interest to you, please let me know. 

Thanks,

-Andrew