OCTANE_Personal_Video(7M)OCTANE_Personal_Video(7M)NAMEevovideo - OCTANE Personal Video
DESCRIPTION
OCTANE Personal Video (aka "evo") provides video input, output, real-time
scaling, colorspace conversion, and capture and playback of video for the
OCTANE line of desktop workstations. It is an integral part of the
solution for desktop communication and video production from Silicon
Graphics.
OCTANE Personal Video on the OCTANE platform works with the SI, SSI and
MXI graphics board sets. It can also be used with the OCTANE Compression
option to provide two channels of compressed video I/O.
FEATURES
Video Input/Output
OCTANE Personal Video supports Composite and SVideo (Y/C) (both analog),
and Digital I/O via the Camera/Digital Video port. The analog I/O jacks
are for use with standard analog video equipment, supporting both PAL and
NTSC video formats. There are a variety of controls available that allow
the user or programmer to set various parameters used for the decoding
and encoding of the video signals.
The digital input is for use with the Digital Camera, or can be connected
to an optional digital video input and output adapter to interface to
standard SMPTE259M serial digital video devices (contact SGI Sales for
digital video adapter information).
Real-Time Color-Space Conversion and Scaling
OCTANE Personal Video comes standard with two independent high-quality,
10-bit color space convertor, and two video scalers.
The color space converters provides the ability to translate between YUVA
and RGBA with high accuracy in real-time. When no alpha channel is
supplied, alpha may be derived from superblack YUV.
The color space converter also converts 4:4:4:4 to 4:2:2:4 and 4:2:2:4 to
4:4:4:4 with CCIR compatable FIR filters in real time. Each of the color
space converter output look up tables (LUT) are user loadable to support
spacial effects and Gamma tables.
The scaler convertes video resolution down to arbitory image resolutions.
Artifact-Free Graphics to Video Output
OCTANE Personal Video helps you combine computer graphics and video
without tell-tale artifacts. Any portion of the NTSC or PAL size graphics
screen, up to full screen resolutions can be selected to be output as
video or capture into main memory. Motion artifacts caused by dropped or
duplicated frames when outputting graphics to video are automatically
elimiated. The anti-flicker output filter eliminates distracting
interlacing artifacts in graphics recorded to video.
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OCTANE_Personal_Video(7M)OCTANE_Personal_Video(7M)VIDEO WINDOWS
OCTANE Personal Video supports one full 24-bit resolution window from
graphics to video outputs. This window is usable as either screen
sources only.
Currently it is not possible to have a single window switch between
graphics and video. The solution is to use two overlapping windows and
unmap the one not being used.
Real-time capture and playback
Using OCTANE Personal Video, live video can be captured into the
computer's memory which can then be displayed in a graphics window on the
screen or further processed by an application. It is also possible to
generate video output from images in memory, which can be displayed on a
standard video monitor, or recorded to a VTR.
OCTANE Personal Video simultaneously supports two real-time memory video
streams. Two video streams can be capture or playback in real-time
simultaneously.
Using the VL programming library (see vlintro(3)), a program can capture
video in either the RGB or YCrCb color spaces, and either full or reduced
size formats, display on the graphics screen, or as an input to a
graphics processing and/or texture operation. Graphics screen can also be
captured directly into memory as video.
SYNC MODES
There are two sync modes in which the products can run:
1. Internal - Used when performing graphics to video out or when the
input video signal is poor quality. All timing is generated internally.
2. Genlock - Used when the output timing must be locked to an external
timing source. OCTANE Personal Video can genlock to the reference input
or either of the video inputs.
TIMING MODES
To eliminate tearing and frame drop, framelock the graphics to the video
by following the directions included in the hardware installation guide.
This is accomplished by using the setmon(1G)-Fe option. Tearing and
frame drop can also be reduced by using the setmon(1G) command to set the
graphics refresh rate to 60 Hz for NTSC, or 50 Hz for PAL.
VIDEO OUTPUT
When performing host memory to video out operations with dithered data,
the output may appear contoured due to artifacts related to converting
dithered RGB images to YUV.
Resolutions from one to one NTSC or PAL sizes up to full screen video out
from the Graphics monitor is supported.
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OCTANE_Personal_Video(7M)OCTANE_Personal_Video(7M)VIDEO DATA TRANSFER
Data transfer denotes transferring video fields or frames between video
and memory. OCTANE Personal Video supports two types of transfers -
discrete and continuous. Frame delay (rate) and dominance field may be
specified for either transfer mode, and transfers may be either triggered
through the GPI input or started immediately.
In discrete mode, the number of frames or fields to transfer is
additionally specified, while in continuous mode the video is transferred
to or from memory until the application ends the transfer.
SUPPORTED PACKING FORMATS
The following VL packing formats are supported by OCTANE Personal Video
for memory transfers. Note that the different memory nodes may support
different formats and packings. See the OCTANE Personal Video
Programmer's Guide for information on each node.
The following packings are natively supported (i.e. require no software
conversion): VL_PACKING_YVYU_422_8, VL_PACKING_YVYU_422_10,
VL_PACKING_YUVA_4444_8, VL_PACKING_AUYV_4444_8, VL_PACKING_ABGR_8,
VL_PACKING_RGBA_8, VL_PACKING_RGB_8, VL_PACKING_BGR_8_P,
VL_PACKING_UYV_8_P
Additionally, the following packings are supported through a software
conversion: VL_PACKING_Y_8_P, VL_PACKING_RGB_332_P
PRODUCT SPECIFIC ISSUES
The following are things to be aware of with the OCTANE Personal Video
product:
The only graphics monitor size supported is 1280 by 1024.
The highest graphics screen refresh rate supported is 72 Hz.
The videoout tool will can only be used with all video outputs.
Input timing, and genlock, cannot be changed while any video application
is running.
The default control values have no effect until a video path is created.
They are used as suggestions for applications such as videoin to specify
the desired input source.
The video tools supplied in /usr/sbin are: videoin, videoout,
videopanel, vidtomen, memtovid, vintovout, and vlinfo.
Due to hardware constraints, two full size NTSC windows cannot fit
horizontally on the 1280x1024 size graphics screen. This is, of course,
also true for full size PAL windows, though both vertically and
horizontally.
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OCTANE_Personal_Video(7M)OCTANE_Personal_Video(7M)
Input Signal Quality
Input timing and source may be changed while any video application is
running but also might cause loss of sync and undesired effects. This
also applies to restoring the factory settings.
Some VCR's don't produce stable NTSC or PAL signals when some tape
transport functions are employed. For example, switching from PLAY to
FAST FOWARD often results in a disruption of the video sync and may cause
O2Video to become confused. The system software attempts to restart the
video capture but it may not be able to and will then return an error to
the application.
Scaler
The hardware scalers on OCTANE Personal Video are 8-bit devices. When
performing scaling of video, 10-bit video will be clipped to 8-bit by the
scaler. The scalers are embedded in the memory node. Any application
using the memory node will clip 10-bit video to 8-bit.
Multiple Graphics Board Configuration
When running video applications that use the screen node on systems that
contain multiple graphics boards, the screen contents sent by the screen
node will be that of the graphics board that is connected to the OCTANE
Personal Video board, regardless of which graphics system the application
is started on. In order to determine which graphics board is connected to
the OCTANE Personal Video board, use the gfxinfo(1G) command.
FILES
/usr/lib/dmedia/video/evo.so /usr/include/vl/dev_evo.h
/usr/etc/video/videod.defaults.evo /usr/etc/video/videod.defaults
/usr/lib/X11/app-defaults/Vcp /usr/lib/X11/app-defaults/Vcp.evo
/usr/demos/bin/video/impact
SEE ALSOvcp(1), videoin(1), videoout(1), vlinfo(1), memtovid(1), vidtomem(1),
vintovout(1), setmon(1G)
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