[rescue] Monitors and Sync

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Thu, Jan 03, 2002 at 10:07:24AM -0500, Big Endian wrote:
> >There seems to be 2 standard chipsets in use for firewire.  Find out which
> >chipset SGI's card uses, and there is a good chance another card with the 
> >same
> >chipset will work, unless SGI has more than just firewire IO on the 
> >card (which
> >would mean other cards probably won't be compatible, but would still be a 
> >good
> >thing here).
> 
> I belive the "winning" standard is OHCI.

Yes, but that doesn't mean that SGI would use it.  Nor does it mean that SGI
wouldn't so something like put hardware compression/decompression on the card
(a good thing, but also something that would completely break compatibility).
 
> >My concern about firewire performance  stems from the fact that svideo,
> >composite video, and, if you buy the right module, SDI video all get piped
> >the video subsystem coming and going, and is compressed/decompressed 
> >(assuming
> >you are using compression) by a chip that is closely tied to the rest of 
> >the
> >graphics subsystem.  So, real time effects using these types of video IO 
> >are
> >fairely trivial.  I wonder if it is as easy to do real time stuff with
> >firewire.  It really doesn't matter that much to me though since I 
> >don't really
> >see any other options.
> 
> it shouldn't be that hard to stream DV over the PCI bus to ICE.  My 
> concern here would be CPU usage.  Is there a way to build a 
> DV->CCIR601 converter?  that way you could use the moose cam port.

Considering how much firewire does in addition to raw DV, I doubt that it would
be easy.  I have heard rumors of people being able to get other 601 sources to
work with the moosecam port.  I was a bit surprised that SGI used 601 for the
cam.  I always thought of it as extremely high end (just look at the price of
their 601 module to replace the AV module).

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd