Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

GPL'd Driver and Linux Support For New H.264 Capture Card

Posted by timothy on from the to-those-who-wait dept.

azop writes "Almost a year ago Slashdot covered the story of a MPEG-4 multiple input capture card with a GPL Video4Linux licensed driver. Earlier this year, Ben Collins added H.264 support into the solo6x10 Video4Linux2 GPL driver. The H.264 PCIe cards are finally released and shipping to customers. The new cards support faster frame rates and sport a PCIe interface. The driver is available for forkin' on Github."

8 of 119 comments (clear)

  1. Software / Firmware by dintech · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Why is it important that linux drivers have source available but we don't worry so much about seeing the firmware source? Should we be pushing to see firmware source too? Instead should it not matter about seeing driver source? I'd love to hear your perspectives.

    1. Re:Software / Firmware by wvmarle · · Score: 4, Insightful

      That doesn't mean firmware can not do evil things. Or does not need any quality vetting or so.

      The BIOS is a kind of firmware too, and there exist viruses that can exploit certain BIOS firmwares and to all kinds of bad things to your computer. Not sure about this specific piece of hardware but I'm quite sure that the trend is towards more and more reprogrammable firmwares, if only to fix bugs after release.

      Anyway I'd say the firmware is about as important as the OS driver. And having the source of the firmware will no doubt provide information to driver developers on how the device really works.

    2. Re:Software / Firmware by Nursie · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Open firmware is also good, but take it one step at a time eh?

      An open source driver for this is great news because it means the driver, and therefore the card, can be rebuilt for different architectures, can be enhanced over time, can do all the stuff that's great about open source. Not to mention serving as a learning aid for others.

      Open firmware would be a bonus because then people have the ability to alter the behaviour of the card itself. Some people do care about this stuff so you have projects like Openmoko's Neo phones. There are also sometimes license problems related to distributing closed firmwares if the OS needs to load them into the device.

      Driver source is more important IMHO, for now, because without it (or reverse-engineered OSS drivers) some of my projects with linux on ARM would not have been possible. One example was a wireless USB card attached to an NSLU2. Windows drivers through the old ndiswrapper were no good, it's only when open source drivers were available I could proceed.

    3. Re:Software / Firmware by GPLHost-Thomas · · Score: 4, Informative

      At Debian, we do care about binary blob firmware without source. We put them in "non-free", and we don't consider it's part of the OS (it wont go in the released CD, etc.).

    4. Re:Software / Firmware by tempmpi · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Often the firmware is what turns a bunch of cheap standard parts into a real product. Unless you want to go open source hardware, too, you need to keep your firmware proprietary, because most of the engineering is actually part of the firmware and pcb layout is just a small part of your product. And it is easy to do a compatible pcb from the scratch.

      --
      Jan
    5. Re:Software / Firmware by GPLHost-Thomas · · Score: 4, Insightful

      And how exactly do you think they provide drivers for Broadcom NICs?

    6. Re:Software / Firmware by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      From their site:

      "Update: June 7th, 2011 - Several important things to note, the BC-H series H.264 cards do not have at traditional firmware that is loaded. Everything is accessed directly from the driver / user space applications. Secondly, we report sales of each encoder to MPEGLA and pay any necessary patent fees for the sale of each encoder, meaning that any cards purchased from Bluecherry already have the patent protection from MPEGLA for the device level encoder."

      So, in this case the discussion is moot - this card doesn't need any shady things to run on my computer - i am getting one!

  2. Re:patents by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Informative

    My understanding, from TFPR, is that the card does h.246 encoding onboard(and the manufacturer of the card has paid their protection money to the MPEG LA) so the driver has no h.246 related duties, it just configures the card and collects the encoded output.

    Obviously, since the output is h.246, it'll need to be decoded for use, which does raise the patent issue; but not at the driver level.