Date: Fri, 24 Mar 1995 14:35:16 -0700 (MST) From: Jeremy Chatfield <jdc@crab.xinside.com> To: jkh@freefall.cdrom.com (Jordan K. Hubbard) Cc: hackers@freefall.cdrom.com Subject: Re: Video stuff... Message-ID: <199503242135.OAA04397@crab.xinside.com> In-Reply-To: <6370.796061101@freefall.cdrom.com> from "Jordan K. Hubbard" at Mar 24, 95 08:05:01 am
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Jordan K. Hubbard writes:
>
> > Walking around Fry's in Palo Alto, Ca., saw a cool demostration of Jazz
> > Jakarta put out by Jazz Multimedia located in Santa Clara, Ca. (408) ???
> > It has an mpeg option and the ability to display an NTSC signal on your
> > VGA or just put out an NTSC siginal. The video output on the VGA looks almos
> t
> > as good as the display on the TV. Going to try to contact them tomorrow to se
> e
> > if they are Net friendly.
>
> Let us know! A number of people are actually working on video support
> for X and FreeBSD (I have a Diamond Viper Pro Video card just waiting
> for X Inside to support it with their video extension! :-) and this is
> an area that's really hotting up. Much interest.
When Accelerated-X 1.2 is finally released, we'll have support for
the Matrox Comet and Matrox Marvel II with the XVideo extension.
Other boards will be supported in the course of the year, but we
wanted limited objectives (one board in two model types, with the
existing X Consortium X Video extension as the API). Later releases
will offer more function and feature enhancements.
Hardware restrictions and the XVideo extension (or our interpretation
of the restrictions, at least), mean that we won't be supporting the
MPEG hardware initially. However, you will be able to take a live
video feed from VCRs or cameras using RGB, S-video and composite
inputs, size them using the on-board scaler and display them in an X
Server at up to 800x600x24bpp or 1152x900x16bpp. The "best"
resolution is probably 1024x768x16bpp with 60Hz refresh.
This is all handled on the board. In fact, I crashed one OS while
playing with the video feed and was momentarily puzzled by the
failure of the mouse to move, or the keyboard to cause a response,
while there was a live video window. I left it that way for fifteen
minutes just to prove that you can do work, when the kernel is dead
;-)
You can also grab images, using XvGetImage, but you can't feed the
video stream to disk (you'd need around 60MB/s sustained, and the
best that we can see on a PC is about 20MB/s). Of course, by the
time that an MPEG compressor has been applied to the input stream,
the data rate is down to acceptable bandwidth requirements.
Current interest in this comes mostly from Medical Imaging
applications, some from Manufacturing (they want pictures of
everything they ship) and some from Law Enforcement for various
purposes (smile please, you're on Accelerated-XVideo!).
So far as the quality of the feed, hmm, I'll put up a file on the Web
Server in a few minutes. Check out the main Web page under What's
New for a link to the file, or look in ftp.xinside.com:/graphics .
At the UniForum Show last week, you could clearly see individual
hairs on people's heads, six feet away from the camera, with a "head
and shoulders" framing. I think it is sharper than TV, but then I
have a 14 inch, 10 year old TV, so I'm not exactly au fait with the
latest TV technology ...
Cheers, JeremyC.
--
Jeremy Chatfield, +1(303)470-5302, FAX:+1(303)470-5513, email:jdc@xinside.com
X Inside Inc, P O Box 10774, Golden, CO 80401-0610, USA.
Commercial X Server - for more information please try these services
http://www.xinside.com info@xinside.com ftp.xinside.com
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?199503242135.OAA04397>