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Linux Media Arts Advances Video in Linux
GigsVT writes "Linux Media Arts has introduced a line of video capture and hardware MPEG encoding cards with full Linux support. The sd601 is a full featured hardware video solution including hardware dissolve, key, wipe, and split screen.
At pricetags around $3000 US, they aren't cheap, but this could break Linux into the video editing market. This isn't vaporware, they are selling these right now."
What the hell is a starwipe?
They may produce high-quality video editing cards, but their web-design definitely sucks. Try to mark their website with your mouse and you will see that in some blank lines they have just added a few characters in the color of the background. I guess this was just lazy programming...
What is "Standard Definition" video? I can record video from my firewire camcorder and edit it with a number of programs. Video card ~ $200 and software $100-$300. This is on Windows of course. Apart from running on Linux, how is this $3000 solution better?
An Amiga with a Video Toaster 2.0 and a time base corrector can be had for around $1200, and with any of the seven mainstream Linux desktop video packages, it can be slaved as a second system, so you control it from a cheap, fast PC running Linux, with the Amiga doing the majority of the hard work.
Video Toaster users are the few sane remaining Amiga fanatics. Most television shows and minor Hollywood production companies still use Video Toaster for the few things you still can't do in Adobe Premier and After Effects.
I already own video capture cards that run under Linux, but what about other imaging products? I was doing some work at a dental office the other day, and they were using specialized video capture equipment for their X-ray machines (running on Windows 98 PCs... blech!). Based on the Windows driver name (bt848.sys), I'm sure it uses a standard video capture chipset used in many TV tuner cards, but these cards *definitely* didn't have Linux drivers.
Maybe someone should use this to start a porn site...then finally someone could claim a profit by using linux. Failing that...this will flop.
Even cooler than that hardware: They're maintaining Broadcast 2000. Now somebody get me a microphone and a fire under my ass so's I can get busy recording some tunes...
Click here if you just like to click on shit.
I thought they already did? Some Linux Journal article about Broadcast 2000 and aA list of supported video capture cards for Linux
Sure the hardware isn't quite Linux supported yet, but at least there are some lower-end cards out there that are supported. So it looks like for the home user the hardware and software is somewhat there. And what about for high-end? Well supposedly Linux is already being used for editing movies (including LOTR). I'm not sure how they get their video onto the computers though, but there must be some way to do it I guess.
So I guess this hardware is special because it is specifically targetted at Linux, but as far as breaking Linux into the video editing market...I think that already happened a little bit so far. And it's not going to get any better with a $3000 USD card.
Broadcast 2000, "the software the competition fears", is the revolutionary Open Source Linux software package created by Heroine Warrior (and now being carried on in development and service by LMA)...
So why can't I find the source or binaries on their website?
--LP, who just wanted to check what parts were truly free
Precisely - which is why I pay for my Linux ;-)
There does appear to be a Sourceforge-related project. The discussions forums have some pointers to non-US (not DMCA affected?) mirrors of the code.
--LP
Wasn't this the program which was voluntarily discontinued by it's author because of some legal reasons? There was a slashdot article about this some time ago... http://slashdot.org/articles/01/09/10/2016257.shtm l
I guess they changed their mind about that...
Umm, with a stock G4, including Mac OS X and lots of coole DV-editing/authoring stuff, and true cutting edge software a (relatively) cheap extra, it seems like there's a lot better thing around if you need a second-to-none DV editing workstation. Why bother?
Wasn't shrek made on linux running Maya? Linux already is in the movie business! (It's called...research)
I'd like to shout out to my Windows XP box: as of now it has an uptime of 2 days 6 hrs 39 min and 55 seconds. A new record for Windows!! Yay!
I took my uncle (big audio and video guy) to last year's linuxworld and he was severely disappointed that he couldn't find anyone coming up with any decent solutions for linux-based video.. he even got a few laughs on the subject. He felt that the system would be perfect to adapt for that type of system, and I'm glad that I can forward him this link to show him that some progress is being made and that he might be able to get a system to play with some time soon..
"Make it idiot proof, and someone will make a better idiot."
http://www.metzlerbros.org/bttv.html
With the right insmod args you can get pretty much any bt8x8 based card working under linux.
Ok, so I've got this Linux PC and its been chugging along ok I guess for the
..National security depends on us.
last 15 months collecting data and stuff, when I needed to install
a plug and play LAN card.
I rip off the top of the box and look for a slot, but the IDE cables are in the way,
so I unplug them - just for a few seconds, to plug in my LAN card, and would
you believe it - the fucking PC crashed. Bloody Linux - what a piece of shit.
At least Windows has 'Plug and Play' which works. I mean, Windows upgrades
have never failed us - we just schedule our hardware upgrades for the time of the
day that the boxes decide to BSOD. This is quite a good feature if you really think
about it - sort of a reminder to 'check to see if any hardware needs upgrading'
Well I'm off to Walmart tomorrow to get lots of shiney new copies of
Windows XP to put onto all our computers here. I have to do this, after all..
regards,
Mr 'X'
Chief Information Officer
Some Major Government Department
NewTek is still producing the Video Toaster, and it's very much in use. I work for Fox, and we've purchased over eighty units this year alone. There's nothing like it for the price, and even high end motion paintboxes lack some of its more basic features.
Do you really think there would be so many desktop video packages with Video Toaster slave support if it were that dated? Hell, half of Maya's rendering target options have to do with extra key modes and depth buffer information for Video Toaster use.
And yes, the 68030 blows Athlons and Xeons out of the water when it comes to SIMD bandwidth, because it can deal with different cache modulos. The straight set-associative cache of the Intel and Athlon architectures kills them when it comes to dealing with full-frame video effect processing, and half the vector opcodes aren't even there, except in the newer, upcoming AMD Hammer architecture.
Linux Media Labs is another group that is providing video hardware that runs under Linux. I have seen motion JPEG work very successfully in a research environment (Internet2) and I know that the test machines are being deployed. You can find out more about the test machines that I am talking about via
Google.
I've put BC2000 up for download here. Also the D5D plugin to allow Xine to play encoded DVDs with Linux.
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
A 800Mhz duron can do realtime 640x480 MPEG2 encoding with a bttv capture card, why pay extra? For $3000, you could get a 2-way SMP 1.7Ghz Athlon system with 3Gigs ram and several hundred gigs hard drive, for goodness sake! I imagine bcast2000 could do most of it's effects in software with such a box, and there are other tools optimized for live effects, like the one at freej.dyne.org [haven't tried it, though].
I mean, it's nice and all for more hardware to be out specifically for linux, but $3000 for a video capture card?!? The video out is probably a lot better than one could expect from a Geforce or the like, however, and may be necessarily appropriate for actual broadcast work.
---
the pen is mightier than the sword, the sword is mightier than the court, the court is mightier than the pen.
This is a far cry from BTTV cards. I should have said "high end video market, on the x86 platform". That would have been more accurate.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
I'm not sure how many video professionals would actuall trade their current desktop video production environment for a linux-based one, but this kind of hardware may be very useful for unattended video work - you know, the box that is sitting there in the rack and encoding, decoding, switching, inserting, etc.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
the direction of the video industry will be very different.
in the future, you will no longer need those mjpeg cards as hardware codecs as well as to generate real time effects.
the new way of doing it is using 1394 to interface with dv devices. the fast cpu nowadays can do more realtime effects simultaneously than the cpu in the hardware cards include.
for the professional world, they will be using sdi to do hdtv uncompressed. so buying expensive specialized hardware is no longer needed.
just a note. avid is the industry standard in video editing software and systems. with their latest release of avid expressdv 3.0, it practically beats all competiting consumer products to the dust.
:)
johnlaw
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
Avid has been hardware assisted for a long time... As for Software try Apples package... It can render to a frame... but not play in real time without first rendering... CPU's are pathetic for video processing... but then again thats not what they are designed for...
I think this is an oem AJA card http://www.aja.com/AJAKONASD.htm
Still I think it's great.
Did anyone actually look at the page that this story links to?
The card is not MPEG related at all. It doesn't do compression or decompression.
It is a very high speed serial interface for high-end video applications. That is all.
Dear Friends: I am a faculty member in the Jones school of management at Rice University in Houston, Texas (this may be verified using a Google search with "Paul Dholakia", or "Utpal Dholakia"). We are conducting an academic research project, studying social interactions online, and how communities organized around products or brands are formed, from a sociological perspective. In this regard, LINUX user groups and mailing lists provide a wonderful context to study these sociological issues. We are conducting a survey of members of LINUX user groups/ mailing lists seeking information on different elements of their thoughts, feelings, and motivations of participating in such groups, and the value of the group to them... The survey is available on the web at the following URL: http://www.surveypro.com/cgi-bin/surveypro/run_sur vey.cgi?id=2444
Of course, this research is strictly academic, and has no commercial links or interests whatsoever. We hope to publish this research in a sociology journal.
As a small token of our appreciation for participants' time, and in the spirit of the philosophy underlying the open-source movement, we will donate $500 total to the five favorite organizations/ groups of our participants' choice (we ask the participant's to nominate their favorite groups in the survey).
I am writing to seek your help in conducting this research, first through participating, and second, through encouraging your portal members to participate in the research.. A short notice at an appropriate place on your website will be exceedingly helpful. Participation in the survey will not take more than ten minutes of your (and their time). Broad participation will increase the validity and generalizability of our findings, making the research more useful.
We welcome all help, and look forward to hearing from you.
Best wishes,
Paul Dholakia
Assistant Professor
Rice University
http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~dholakia
who cares??
when it comes to video editing, I am not in the market for a $3000 something :) [It's a legitimate market, and I'm glad people exist to whom that would be a reasonable investment in the pursuit of their art, I'm just not one of them.]
... but just simple "hone down to the best 2 minutes on a typical camcorder home recording, re-order, and burn" would be enough to satisfy me for a while. I'd like to be able to put my own recordings (if any are good) onto cheap CD-Rs to share with friends / family.
However, I really would like (would gladly pay $50 extra for a distro that allowed me to *easily*, out-of-the-box, no-foolin', no hassles, do the following 3 things, with free software):
1) import over firewire from a digital video camera (yes, it's possible; is it out-of-box ready from any distribution? Can I plug the cheap floor-model Sony digital camera I bought from Best Buy into a box running any available distribution which will correctly recognize / identify the hardware and let me haul in the video from it?]
2) Set edit points something like iMovie allows on the Mac (I believe Windows now comes with a similar program, but I have not seen it), and then duplicate / rearrange / shorten / delete clips. Doesn't have to be pretty, just has to let me define beginning and ending points, and then assemble the resulting collage.
3) Burn to VCD / SVCD
That's it.
Now, there are a lot of other things it would be nice to have -- color correction, titling, fancy fades and wipes, DVD authoring, complex sound capabilities, animations, bluescreen abilities
I hope interest in video-on-Linux trickles down enough that a real, working, easy integrated package to do at least these three things actually reaches us. (Can be a pretty wrapper adding together separate programs to do each of those things, of course.)
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
...and while we currently use SGI O2s for our live insertion systems (I work for Sportvision, the people whoe brought you the virtual yellow 1st down line in football, etc), we're moving to a intel platform.
Sgi is dying- They tried to make systems and their product revision cycles were just too slow for hardware consting tens of thousands of dollars... (not to mention that SGIs stuff is just dog slow for the $$) So... we're moving to the PC, hopefully Linux.
For our stuff, we've found that the DVS card (out of Germany) works best- It does 66 Mhz, 64 bit PCI, simultaneous in and out, has up to a second of delay onboard (user selectable), and it has colorspace conversion on board. We've paired this board with an intel i860 chipset since it is one of only two boards (the other is AMD supplied) that does 4bit/66Mhz PCI and 4X AGP.
The colorspace conversion is really the killer feature for us on teh DVS card (well, that and the fast PCI)- It saves us from having to do it on the CPU (which takes up a lot of processor at 270 or 540 Mbit/second!!).
Our biggest wish right now is for someone to make good GL drivers for linux (glReadPixels has to be fast so that we can rendered video and blit it out of the AGP card at framerate) Currently the only one we've found to work well is NVidia's proprietary drivers..)
We havn't tried the LMA card as my attempt to reach anyone over there was met with 4 consecutive seemingly intentional hangups.
I'd love to use the LMA card, but at $3000 it just doesn't have all the features the the DVS card does for the price- ($600 more in quantity, and DVS hasn't ever hung up on us..).
i'm working in the music industry: i do recording and post-production, which is pretty much the entirety of the music industry before video, marketing and sales. right now, for work purposes, i do my work on MacOS, using programs like Logic. i'm very interested in moving my work to linux, if software and hardware exists. i haven't researched it much, i'm not in a position to do so. does anyone out there have experience in audio editing in linux? any recommendations on how to go about the process of switching over? hardware/ software issues?
the penguin will eat you.
linux use in the music industry? hardware? software? ....anybody?
the penguin will eat you.
This is really bad news for SGI. I'd heard that DreamWorks was disatisfied with SGI, but they must be totally disillusioned to abandon SGI's famous massively parallel systems in favor of a Linux cluster! Makes you wonder who will buy the Itanium supercomputers SGI is betting its future on.