VOGONS


First post, by xjas

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What the title says. Looking for a DOS app that can work with old PCI "tv tuner" / NTSC+PAL video capture cards (ATI Rage Theater, Conexant, Matrox, etc.) I need this for... reasons, certainly not stupid ones.

All I need is for it to display the input of the card, de-interlaced, in full screen. (Suitably crunched down to Mode-X/13h or some VESA mode.) I don't need any kind of overlay, TV tuner functionality or even sound support.

It it doesn't exist, how hard would it be to write? Do these cards just capture to a framebuffer in memory you can read from, or are they more software controlled?

Any suggestions?

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Reply 1 of 6, by darry

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xjas wrote on 2020-08-21, 20:06:
What the title says. Looking for a DOS app that can work with old PCI "tv tuner" / NTSC+PAL video capture cards (ATI Rage Theate […]
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What the title says. Looking for a DOS app that can work with old PCI "tv tuner" / NTSC+PAL video capture cards (ATI Rage Theater, Conexant, Matrox, etc.) I need this for... reasons, certainly not stupid ones.

All I need is for it to display the input of the card, de-interlaced, in full screen. (Suitably crunched down to Mode-X/13h or some VESA mode.) I don't need any kind of overlay, TV tuner functionality or even sound support.

It it doesn't exist, how hard would it be to write? Do these cards just capture to a framebuffer in memory you can read from, or are they more software controlled?

Any suggestions?

I am no programmer, but I suggest you take a look at Conexant/Rockwell BT848 and BT878 Linux driver sources to get an idea how those chips, some of the better documented ones, work .

Reply 2 of 6, by xjas

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^^ looks like my Avermedia card has a BT878, good suggestion. A quick search found this open source BT8xx WDM package in addition to the Linux/BSD drivers, but nothing for DOS yet. I also found a rather detailed spec sheet for the chip. Still looking around...

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Reply 3 of 6, by darry

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xjas wrote on 2020-08-21, 20:51:

^^ looks like my Avermedia card has a BT878, good suggestion. A quick search found this open source BT8xx WDM package in addition to the Linux/BSD drivers, but nothing for DOS yet. I also found a rather detailed spec sheet for the chip. Still looking around...

I was not expecting that you find DOS software, I was hoping that the driver source code would give enough of a base to write your own .

Another option is to look through Dscaler source code . AFAIK, that program can use a BT878 directlly without a driver . It is a Windows application, but the BT878 access routines might be portable to DOS . Again, I am not a programmer, so sorry if I am spouting nonsense .

Reply 4 of 6, by xjas

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No worries! I'm just documenting stuff in this thread as I look around. Appreciate any pointers. 😀

TBH, I'm not expecting to find anything for DOS either, but just thought I'd put up this thread in case there's something somebody knows about that I don't find. Windows 3.1 support would also be cool.a

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Reply 6 of 6, by Tiido

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No such software exists from what I know so you'll need to make one yourself. In theory it is not super difficult, comprehensive documentation of the chipsets exists and it shouldn't be super hard to get image out of them. You will need beefy hardware since you probably cannot rely on bus mastering straight to video memory or something and all must be done via CPU along with any image processing algos you want to use.

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