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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."
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.
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
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?
Apart from running on Linux, how is this $3000 solution better?
The card is a professional solution for the professional broadcast market, for what it does $3000 is actually pretty resonable.
This product takes SDI (Serial Digial Interface) for video input which is the standard to broadcast video, it runs at 270Mbs and is not found on anything but professional (or at best "prosumer") gear.
This is not the first pro card that does SDI under Linux either, IIRC Optibase have a Mediapump card that does SDI under *nix.
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A wipe is a way of 'cutting' between two shots. The existing shot is wiped away and replaced by the new shot. It's used a lot in Star Wars. A star wipe is a wipe in a star shape. Usually starting in the middle of the existing shot. Inside the star is the new shot. The star expands outwards until the new shot replaces the existing shot. Quite common in late 70's-early 80's music videos.
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With the right insmod args you can get pretty much any bt8x8 based card working under linux.
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.
You really don't know anything about video, do you?? this is PRO equipment, not something which gives you a compress video (a.k.a MPEG, MPEG-2, etc)...
Hetz (Heunique)
Yeah, I've tried FFMpeg too.
Do you think this even compares to a $3k hardware encoder? A real-time software encoder is cutting corners everywhere: integer math (probably in the form of MMX), fixed "one size fits all" lookup tables, and little if any motion detection. You know, it's easy to make a real-time MPEG encoder if you only use I frames, but then you basically have motion-JPEG. The real compression payoff in MPEG comes from motion detection with P (predicted) and B (bi-directional predicted) frames. Simply put, the real-time software encoders will produce crap output. That may be acceptable for your PVR-knockoff (I know, I've been using VCR with DiVX under Linux for abouta year now), but it isn't for DVD production. And that's what this card is for.
I'm a professional artist using Maya and Shake (highend 3d and compositing packages) both under maya. it sucks to have to have a win2k box just for puting out to tape. i was planning on getting a g4 so i can keep it all under a unixie type environment but this looks like a great solution.
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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
My current work environment would definately welcome the chance to ditch the several dozen windows boxen it has doing just this type of work now. We also need some major beefy boxen for desktop video and graphics rendering in real time... in an Irix environment... so folks wouldn't be wholly hostile to linux-based stuff. Although I admit it's a major battle to get the okay to use Linux for anything at my work... including web services.
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