Welcome to the Home Page for the Pinnacle/Miro DC30 Driver

This is the first public release of the Linux device driver for the Pinnacle/Miro DC30 Video Editing Board. It is pre-alpha (actually it is a feasibility study), but it works surprisingly stable on my system. The supplied source files are the result of rapid prototyping, derived from the BTTV driver, most of the names, strings and comments are left unchanged. This definitly needs a cleanup for the next release. Don't complain about this - I wanted to provide a working evaluation release as soon as possible.

Most params are hardcoded as constants, only PAL square pixel mode is supported, and it works only with DC30 boards (I don't have specifications of other zoran-based Motion JPEG boards like DC10, DC30plus, ...).

Supported Features

• Input selection of 3 video sources
• Display of a video signal in an Overlay window
  (with the help of an Xwindows TV Viewer Program not included in this package; see below PACKAGES REQUIRED)
• Motion Video Compression/Decompression of a video stream; including utilities for capture and playback

Features to be supported

• Clipping of the Overlay window
• Snapshot of a single frame without hardware compression
• Lossless JPEG Compression mode and baseline JPEG compression up to scaling factors 1:1
• NTSC/SECAM modes (maybe square pixel and CCIR)
• Video output (doesn't work yet)

Build and Install

The driver was delelopped and tested on Linux 2.1.127.

First you need the videodev and i2c modules installed. If needed reconfigure the Linux kernel and configure the videodev and for example bttv support as modules.

In the driver subdirectory of this package execute:

make dep

make clean

make

If no errors occured install the modules for the video decoder and the dc30:

insmod vpx32xx

insmod dc30

Now the video device should be present in the kernel and the xawtv application can be started, and the signal of the selected video input should be visible in the overlay window.

NOTE

The driver doesn't use the designated major device number for the DC10/DC30 but for the Video4Linux devices instead as it appears to become a standard interface for video devices.
I've tested the DC30 board together with a BT848 (Hauppauge WinTV).

Clipping is not yet supported; the entire overlay window is always visible if not totally hidden by other windows.

There is no 8-bit color mode in the Zoran Multimedia Controller, so a 256-color Xserver won't work. 15/16/24/32-bit modes are implemented and tested, on some Xservers (like XF86_S3V for S3Virge) it is neccessary to supply a -b 24 or -b 24 option to the xawtv command.

Packages required

• You may want to get Gerd Knorr's xawtv package (or any Video4Linux API compliant application) package at least for two reasons:
  1. Selection of video inputs
  2. Overlay window display

  Just follow the install intructions and specify 3 video input entries in the .xawtv file.

  The driver scales arbitrarily in horizontal and vertical directions (so you can specify lower values for XtNwidthInc and XtNheightInc in the source file main.c, e.g. 1)

Acknowledgements

Zoran , ITT Intermetall et al for providing datasheets

The members of the Video4Linux / BTTV development team

Gerd Knorr for delelopping the xawtv package

it was a great help for testing

Related Work

The Miro DC1+ Linux Device Driver Project by Wolfgang Scherr for the ISA based DC1plus

Download

DC30 device driver pre-release 0.0

Check out and fave fun!

provided © 1998 by Martin Pirker <e8125426@student.tuwien.ac.at> Vienna University of Technology, Austria Computer Graphics Dept.