SGI: Hardware

ClassicHasClass wrote: And the best news of all. On a brainwave, based on recondas' prior post, I dumped avc_vidtomem to an .mts file. And guess what can play it?Yes, laydeeez, the MTS file is fully playable by Irix itself.

The situation with the captured video is actually better than I'd hoped.

Rather than capturing a mpeg transport stream, the video stream captured by the DM10 is in DV/DIF digital format.

Here's the results of "Get Movie Info" run against the test sample so kindly provided by ClassisHasClass:

I'm going to do more testing on the audio, possibly record a longer sample from a different source. That test file should have audible audio in it.

Renaming it to test.dv, QuickTime suddenly volunteers to play it on the G5, and it plays there in QuickTime Player as well. Where did you get the Get Movie Info stuff from?

ClassicHasClass wrote: I'm going to do more testing on the audio, possibly record a longer sample from a different source. That test file should have audible audio in it.

The movie info seems to think audio is possible with the DIF/DV format, so please let us know what you find out.

ClassicHasClass wrote: Where did you get the Get Movie Info stuff from?

The easy way is to right click on the file icon in the IRIX File Manager and select "Get Movie Info" from the drop down menu.

recondas wrote: The easy way is to right click on the file icon in the IRIX File Manager and select "Get Movie Info" from the drop down menu.

Irix is pretty cool There's so many useful little things built in that I'm still finding new ones after more than fifteen years of daily use ...

I'm impressed, this is nice.

mia wrote: I'm impressed, this is nice.

I agree.

In its day SGI hardware had a large footprint in Hollywood, so I'd guess just about everyone who's owned SGI gear has at least considered exploring the use of some of the traditional MIPS/IRIX video applications. For the Tezro or Ony350 that has meant adding the expense of a DM3, a DMedia VBoB (and the usually-not-included/not-easy-to-find LVDS cabling), plus an SD or HD capable video hardware. Lacking an XIO2 slot for a DM3, the Fuel is limited to the almost-never-seen-in-the-wild DM6/DVS SDStation, plus SD video gear.

While I'm not suggesting a generic TI-based firewire board and a Canopus ADVC box will produce the same results as a DM3 or DM6, they would allow someone with a Fuel/Tezro/O300/O350/O3k to capture digital video and explore the world of SGI video editing at a lower cost. With that in mind I'm kind of surprised at the lack of participation in this thread.

To further expand the list of IIDC/AV/C hardware supported by the DM10, I tested a ADS Pyro 1394 IIDC webcam. I also have a lead on a couple of non-Canopus AV/C firewire capture devices, a Pinnacle Studio DV and an AJA IO. Getting the AJA unit working under IRIX will probably be a reach (since it was specifically designed for Mac hardware running Final Cut), but if it can be made to work the AJA IO can do analog-to-digital conversion/capture or digital-to-digital capture via firewire, and has an internal TBC (along with some other spiffy professional features).

But back to the ADS Pyro 1394. Immediately after attachment it appeared in the console and the syslog (yes, I got away with hot-plugging into the Tezro again): fwprobe looked good: Since I hot-plugged, I stopped and restarted the mldaemon, then ran mlquery: And was able to successfully display a video feed from the Pyro 1394 using iidc_vidtogfx: To my eye the video quality looked to be every bit the equal of the iSight, with the Pyro 1394 having the advantage of generally being available for less $.

recondas wrote: With that in mind I'm kind of surprised at the lack of participation in this thread.

More round tuits are required. But rest assured that I, and probably many others, are reading with great interest and fuzzy notions of trying this out at some point.

Great news about the ADS Pyro camera. Looking forward to your findings on the AJA unit.

recondas wrote: To further expand the list of IIDC/AV/C hardware supported by the DM10, I tested a ADS Pyro 1394 IIDC webcam.

At the risk of diminshing the supply of suitable cameras, I came across this :

some website or other wrote: Some of the supported web cameras include the Orange Micro iBOT, ADS Pyro WebCam, Vcam IEEE 1394 PC Camera, Aplux 1394 PC Camera and any FireWire web camera based on the Texas Instruments TSB15LV01 chipset should also work.

I also tried a "BlackHawk" firewire webcam which looks exactly like the iRez Stealthfire. Maybe time to drag it back out of the closet ... gave up on the dual-connection USB-firewire card with the O350 tho. I could get it to boot, use the USB, identify the firewire card but never would see any connected firewire devices. That could have been a faulty card but for now ...

I don't know if anyone is going to set their Fuel on the roof to do this but looks interesting :

http://www.nitehawk.com/rasmit/low_light.html

Besides the other good stuff, about 2/3 down the page there is a link to a TI pdf on an "evaluation board for CCD's" which is dead but indicates that there is/was an evaluation board for interfacing various ccd's to the computer via the TI firewire chipset, which we know works ... didn't SAQ just buy a new soldering iron ?

Edited to remove doubts about the BlackHawk IEEE1394 Digital Camera. Works.

Thanks to this post by nekonoko I've discovered that it's possible to use the IRIX CGI snap tool and a DM10-attached camera to remotely view snapshots via html. Might be handy for anyone who wants to visually monitor the area around/environment of an SGI system from elsewhere on a network (or the internet).

Please Note: Because of the relative age of IRIX, take a close look at your security before enabling or using Outbox.

To use 'Snap' you'll need to have a web server running and have "Outbox" configured. The release notes for Outbox have most of the basic info you'll need to get things running. If you're not certain if Outbox is installed and/or can run, from the Toolchest, select Internet > Browse OutBox Page. That'll call a script called "openhomepg" that will either open your Outbox page in your browser or offer a dialogue that tells how to install it.

To use the DM10-attached camera with Outbox you also need to change line 18 of the "snap" script from mlcamera="DISABLED" to mlcamera="ENABLED" . The Outbox Release Notes don't mention the 'mlcamera' stuff, but as nekonoko pointed out in his post, somewhere along the line SGI updated the script to include ML cameras.

Snap converts the camera image to a 320x240 pixel gif. I was able to double the size of the snapped image by editing line 52 of the the snap script from "size=320x240" to "size=640x480". Here's a couple of examples of a few Outbox web pages:


BTW, Outbox offers a pretty simple method to share files from your IRIX box to other systems inside your network. Just right click on a file you own and select "Publish to Outbox..." from the drop-down menu. That file will be accessible in the 'Public' folder of your Outbox page.

Ha! That's awesome!

I thought everybody knew about that... :/ of course without the camera all you get is the indian head test pattern...

recondas wrote: Please Note: Because of the relative age of IRIX, take a close look at your security before enabling or using Outbox.

Sure, that's a good idea regardless of Outbox. The guidelines in the IRIX Installation and Customization wiki page have some excellent suggestions on that front.

Better still, do those things and keep the IRIX box behind the firewall and have it push the image out to a webserver running a more modern OS...

guardian452 wrote: I thought everybody knew about that.

First time SGI owners become involved in nekochan all the time, so it really wasn't aimed at anybody already fully qualified for the been-there-done-that merit badge.

Sorry, didn't mean to be condescending.. it's good to know that it works with these devices, and not just (i.e. indycam and O2cam).

All I've ever gotten to see is:


Still it is a very cool default setup

Had the opportunity to try the DM10 IIDC camera setup connected through a Firewire hub.

Did initial testing using the Tezro and ADS Pyro 1394 IIDC camera described earlier in this thread. The hub used is a Belkin FU526-APL-S 6-port Firewire hub . During this test the ADS Pyro 1394 was connected to the FW hub rather than directly to the DM10 (for those not already familiar with the DM10, no rare $GI hardware is needed - a generic PCI firewire HBA can be used ).

The booting the system with the FU526 FW hub attached (added the ADS Pyro later) produced an 'businfo read' alert message in the syslog: Just to make the test a little more challenging, after IRIX booted the ADS Pryo camera was hot-plugged into the FW hub. Syslog again produced a businfo read alert: In spite of the businfo alerts, the ADS Pyro worked without issue when connected to the FW hub, as did a MicroTech Firewire Compact Flash card reader .

Haven't had the opportunity to test it yet, but don't expect the FW iSight will behave much differently.

recondas wrote: Haven't had the opportunity to test it yet, but don't expect the FW iSight will behave much differently.

Have you been able to get an iSight to work directly attached ? I remember that a few people tried to use an iSight before but had problems with it.

hamei wrote: Have you been able to get an iSight to work directly attached ? I remember that a few people tried to use an iSight before but had problems with it.

Yep, It works.

Out late last night showin' up the whippersnappers?

in the second post in this very thread, hamei wrote: Another small step for Man ! Congratulations

I remember that neko got almost to that point but his iSight would not work. Maybe this means that the supported Canopus ADVC device could one day be persuaded to function ?

Super news, thank you !

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=16727655#p7359565

My FW iSight works fine with the Fuel too.

recondas wrote: Out late last night showin' up the whippersnappers?

No, I just turned off that portion of the brain to save on electricity. Trying to cut down on the carbon footprint ...

Amends for brainfade, can add another camera known to work ...


The name printed on top is "BlackHawk IEEE1394 Digital Camera" but it looks exactly like the iRez Stealthfire. The DuoConnect didn't seem to like it. Tezro and O350 don't seem to like the DuoConnect, so maybe that's fair ... Had to use recondas' excellent writeup to discover that the TIMING on this camera was the glitch,

so tried ...

which brought it to life. Not bad. Focus is sharp, motion is decent, looks as good as Facetime even in fairly low-light conditions, pretty good for a webcam. Looks like the basics of getting an IIDC camera to work have been solved