dbjag@io.UUCP (David Benjamin) (07/30/87)
WANTED : tips on reading the Digi-View video digitizer &
digitizers in general
Has anyone had any experience reading input from NewTek's Digi-View
unit? It's a little box that plugs into the parallel port of the Amiga
and accepts an NTSC video signal via an RCA plug.
I've been playing around with some graphics & image processing ideas, and
if I could read video image data right off of the device,
that would make for some additional fun. This isn't for any planned
marketable software, so I don't mind hacks. I just need a rough idea of how
the input should be handled.
I tried out an assumption that the box was merely a A/D converter and
the input read from the parallel port would be a digitized version of
a video waveform. I'm familiar with the form of a video signal, and
was hoping that with a little massaging, the data would produce an
appropriate form. This approach is turning out to be a little bit
naive...(surprise, surprise)...
I called up NewTek in Topeka, and a technician there gave me some
rough facts about the code, but the guy who wrote the software is
away (at SIGGRAPH, of course), so I won't be able to speak to him
for another week. Even then, I'm not sure I'd be up for some sort
of source license agreement. Unless they have a set of library
functions they'd be willing to sell...
Anyways, in the meantime, does anybody have any information that might
be useful with this task? Any related advice is welcome, even
"If I was to decode a video signal of some type, I'd go about it this
way..." advice is quite welcome, it needn't be specific to the
Digi-View product specifically.
By the way, maybe I should take this opportunity to give Digi-View a
free plug. Its a neat little device that offers a wide range of
relatively inexpensive scanning capability to the Amiga. It is by
far the most useful addition I've gotten to my machine (although the
extra Mbyte of RAM is catching up quick). I definitely recommend it.
(..picture yourself back in January 1986, a young man buys an Amiga and
tells his friends, "Just wait till March, when Amiga LIVE comes out,
then, boy, things'll be swell, just swell!")
Thanks in advance!
--
...!harvard!umb!ileaf!dbjag Dave Benjamin, Interleaf, Cambridge, Ma
...!sun!sunne!ileaf!dbjag (617) 577-9813 x5489