[AG-TECH] HDMI VIC

[Vine, Derek A]

All,

We are finally getting our project together to upgrade our AG to HD.  This will be a fairly large project for our group, with a total of 6 sites potentially making the move to HD.  Before I submit my recommendation I want to make sure that everything is current and has a high probability of working across our group.

I was wondering if there have been any advances since April to the HDMI vic.  In particular, if there have been any advances in supported or recommended hardware or if it is still the Blackmagic Intensity Pro capture card.  Also, if any more display cards have been tested and utilized besides the Nvidia 9800 cards.

On a related note I have found a nifty little camera http://viewbits.com/Indoor-1080i-and-p-Camera-with-HDMI-HD-SDI.html.  I have not been able to find a dealer yet for this camera but I have contacted viewbits and am waiting on a reply.

Any input would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,

Derek Vine
Communication Network Specialist
DDN Site Coordinator
The University of South Dakota
Office - 605-677-5042
Cell - 605-677-8215
dvine at usd.edu




From: adhesionmusic at gmail.com [mailto:adhesionmusic at gmail.com] On Behalf Of Andrew Ford
Sent: Monday, April 20, 2009 2:57 PM
To: Vine, Derek A
Cc: Jimmy Miklavcic; ag-tech at mcs.anl.gov; Mike.W.Daley at cs.cardiff.ac.uk; Nathan Gardiner
Subject: Re: [AG-TECH] HDMI VIC system useage on Windows

Hi,

We've been able to send a 720p stream (from a VGA-HDMI scaler) at about 24-25fps on a machine with a dual-core, hyperthreaded 3.46Ghz P4 processor and 2Gig of RAM, which essentially maxes out one of the cores. Trying to view streams on that machine, however, usually results in some packet loss.

Mike and Jimmy - what framerate and bitrate were you running at? I'm concerned since I was only about to get about 11fps when trying to send a 1080i stream; above that and it tended to choke. The problem is that since this version of vic is entirely single-threaded, it's always going to be stuck on one core, which is going to severely limit performance of single instances of vic. I.e., sending 3 720p streams might be fine, but sending just a single 1080i stream could be problematic depending on processor, and the same goes for receiving many HD streams with a single vic. Jimmy, this is probably why decoding many streams showed an even 25% processor use. Did you see any packet loss when you were trying this?

Derek - using a Decklink is theoretically possible but I'm not sure if it's guaranteed to be supported right now. Nathan Gardiner from HIT Lab NZ would know for sure; I'm cc'ing him on this. If you want to play it safe, I would go with an Intensity card and cameras with HDMI outputs that are switchable between 720p and 1080i. Also keep in mind that the current version does not support 1080i at 30fps; I'm going to see what I can do about that soon.

--Andrew
2009/4/17 Vine, Derek A <Derek.Vine at usd.edu<mailto:Derek.Vine at usd.edu>>
Thank you very much for your input.  For a follow-up question, what cameras are you using?  I am considering the Sony EVI-HD1 but I haven't heard of anyone else using them.  Plus since they don't have HDMI I would need to get something from the DeckLink line or a different manufacturer for the HD-SDI input but I am not sure if VIC will support that.

I just don't want to tell them to spend $20k on cameras and capture cards just to find that they won't work, and we all know how fun an exchange is through a University system.

Thank you again for your input.

--Derek

________________________________
From: Jimmy Miklavcic [mailto:jimmy.miklavcic at utah.edu<mailto:jimmy.miklavcic at utah.edu>]
Sent: Fri 4/17/2009 5:17 PM
To: Vine, Derek A
Cc: ag-tech at mcs.anl.gov<mailto:ag-tech at mcs.anl.gov>
Subject: RE: HDMI VIC system useage on Windows
Derek, I recently built a new AG System with two Core Duo Quad systems. I have three Blackmagic Intensity Pro cards in the capture machine and a display machine with two Nvidia 9800XT graphics cards. I tried putting a fourth Intensity pro card in the display machine but it was a bit much.

On the capture system, we used the H.264 codec at 720/30p and with three vics, the system was running above 75% across all four processors. The display machine, in our case, decoding around 15 incoming streams, all using H.264 or Mpeg-4, was running around 25% across all four CPUs. We did run audio on a third machine, 48KHz, stereo. But I don't see any reason for not running rat on your display machine.

We also discovered the the H.264 consumer service also pick up all the streams but we just ran the HDMI-Vic manually. We did nothing special with the venue server.

Good luck. If you want to test your system with mine, let me know.

Jimmy

 --
Jimmy Miklavcic
Multimedia Specialist
Jimmy.Miklavcic at utah.edu<mailto:Jimmy.Miklavcic at utah.edu>

UNIVERSITY OF UTAH
CTR FOR HIGH PERFORM COMPUTING
155 SOUTH 1452 EAST RM 405
SALT LAKE CITY, UT 84112-0190

Office: 801.585.9335
 Fax: 801.585.5366

http://www.anotherlanguage.org<http://www.anotherlanguage.org/>


________________________________
From: ag-tech-bounces at lists.mcs.anl.gov<mailto:ag-tech-bounces at lists.mcs.anl.gov> [mailto:ag-tech-bounces at lists.mcs.anl.gov<mailto:ag-tech-bounces at lists.mcs.anl.gov>] On Behalf Of Vine, Derek A
Sent: Friday, April 17, 2009 3:27 PM
To: ag-tech
Subject: [AG-TECH] HDMI VIC system useage on Windows

For those of you who are or have used the HDMI VIC on Windows, could you please provide your capture hardware, system specs and the resource usage to both capture and display?



What I am really getting down to is will a system be able to support three HD cameras for capture and up to 9 HD streams to display?  My plan is to use 2 workstations each with 2 QC Intel Xeon processors, one for capture and the other for display and sound.



Finally, do we need to make any special considerations as far as our Venue Server to support these streams?



Any information that can be provided is greatly appreciated.



Thank you,



Derek Vine

Communication Network Specialist

The University of South Dakota

414 East Clark Street

Vermillion, SD 57069

(605) 677-8215

dvine at usd.edu<mailto:ceddn at usd.edu>





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