[mythtv-users] WOT: Moving video around in a PC without using overlay

Jay Ashworth jra at baylink.com
Thu Mar 3 02:26:33 UTC 2011


This is, as the subject notes, Way Off Topic, but the people I know who
are mostly likely to have a clue what I'm talking about live here.

If you're not interested, killfile the thread now.  :-)

I work at a small, poor television network in Florida, and while we
actually have a 40" flat-screen as a wall monitor in our control room,
it's driven by a bunch of chained NTSC quad-splitter boxes, and looks as 
miserable as you might expect.

They make commercial boxes that do this work, called 'multiviewers', 
but the cheapest of those start at $5-8k, and if I could get that much
money out of management, I'd spend it on other stuff.

Still, I'd like to solve the problem.

If I were to build a Linux box with a pair of 8-channel, 8-chip BT848
capture cards, such as are built for usages like Zoneminder, I clearly
couldn't use video-overlay to move the video from the inputs to parts
of the output screen (a 1080p monitor or two, connected by HDMI to a VGA
card)... so how *would* I have to do that, in code?  I'm assuming that 
moving (and scaling, a bit), 16 frames of NTSC video is something a P4
machine could do in 1 frame-time?

If that's all the box was doing, at least?

Is there any skeleton code that addresses anything that looks like this
problem?

(Note that this is monitor-level; none of this has to actually be broadcast
quality, as none of it ever goes near the air...)

Thanks to anyone with suggestions.

Cheers,
-- jr 'we now return you to our regularly scheduled mayhem' a


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