Looking Glass capture card

Software & Operating Systems Linux
1

Hello,

I have quite crazy idea and I reference to https://forum.level1techs.com/t/looking-glass-triage/130952/1392

I don’t know how technically it is possible, but I think there are some companies which can build “custom” PCI card.

Idea is that we had custom Looking Glass PCI card, which would have HDMI IN (for example), some small memory for saving current frame and chip which would take frame from HDMI IN and save it into memory, then host GPU would just display it.

I know there are capture cards out there, but they are proprietary and they works mostly only with proprietary software, I mean this like push Looking Glass into next level :smile: I would pay for it.

Advantage of it, is that you don’t have to care about capturing frames on host, you can just focus on displaying it.

I know it is really stupid idea, but I would like to listen opinions, maybe it is not possible to create custom PCI card (maybe because it is really expensive), I don’t know.

2

  1. There are plenty of HDMI capture cards that have open source V4L drivers, there is no need to re-invent the wheel.

  2. If you were to invent this device, the cost would be far greater then just purchasing a NVidia Quadro or better which would enable the use of the efficient NvFBC capture API, which would not only be faster but cheaper.

  3. We already get the frame out of system ram directly, adding such a interface into the mix will add additional load, power usage, and latency to the capture.

3

Oh I thought that if it will be “hardware” based it will be faster than current solution. I was wrong.

4

SDI to DMA exists. That’s what high end Quadros and FirePros can interface with by sending SDI over PCI-Express.

On Nvidia it’s called GPUDirect. On AMD it’s called DirectDMA.

SDI capture with DMA is going to be easier to find than HDMI capture with DMA functions directly to the GPU.