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