DigiLite-ZL - open source digital video platform

[markaren1]

Hello all,

Below is a link to a new DATV project which may be of interest.

** please note **, this project is no way intended as competition for the tremendous DigiLite project, the motivation is more towards an open source digital video experimentation platform.

http://www.idesignz.org/DigiLiteZL/DigiLiteZL.htm

Regards,

Mark

[markaren1]

Hi All,

Just updated the website with progress on the project.

http://www.idesignz.org/DigiLiteZL/DigiLiteZL.htm

Regards,

Mark

[M0DTS]

Hi,

Very interesting variation on the system.
An embedded Linux board could be a intermdiate but a little expensive way to interface the hauppauge USB card to it...
The DE0-Nano dev board looks nice, will come in handy for other projects too if i get a bit more programming experience!!

Which prog/scripts are being used in the TS generation in linux these days?

Rob
M0DTS

[markaren1]

Hi Rob,

I have been given a closed source PS -> TS win32 app to do offline processing with, so that is the main source at the moment. Have also been playing with direct Test Card generation (see other postings).

Linux seems to have quite a friendly video API (v4l2), where video devices appear character devices (/dev/video0 etc). This aids the task of writing a realtime PS -> TS filter a little less daunting. So current plan is to write a custom app to do the job, but there are the usual 1000 or so pages of ref docs to dig through. The main issue appears to be de-muxng to PES, re-timestamping then re-muxing to TS.

Phase one is to write a Linux offline PS to TS converter.

Phase two is to implement this in real time, directly reading from /dev/video0, and directly outputting to /dev/ttyUSB0.

Phase three is get my head around the USB interface to the WinTV-HVR-1900. This means learning more than I want to about USB and getting a USB host running on a fast uP (maybe DSPIC33EP256MU806, which has USB OTG, so has a USB host with 16 endpoints).

So it is really a matter of getting down to bit-level at every step of the way before moving to the next level of complexity.

By phase 3, I may finally be old and wise which will lead to phase 4, or throwing it all in and opening a pub...

Currently digging through hex dumps of video and audio PES streams and building some analysis tools in VC6 - progress is slow, but forwards.

There is also the opportunity to load a soft-core processor on the remaining 96% of FPGA space and do the work there.

The challenge for me is to break this project into small, bit size pieces, then move on to the next. If this is to be useful, one needs to bear in mind the narcoleptic programmer - if things suddenly grind to a halt, what is the best legacy that I can pass on to the next person to take the baton ? A single huge project will not do well with this last scenario...

Wanna help ??

-Mark

[M0DTS]

Yes V4L is superb to work with compared to Windows.
Ok on your progress so far, looks like you are progressing far more than i got, i could not get my head around all the timing stuff so I went down the Opencaster route which was far from perfect but did end up with a reasonable signal!
I just don't have the low level knowledge of what's going on so doubt i can help much...

My projects are very sporadic so a couple of weeks and i'm onto something else... hi

Rob

[Leon]

Hello!

I am very, very interested on this project. I think that this would be the first open source project for a hardware DVB encoder! Today, it's hard to find DVB encoder/modulator at reasonable price, for amateur projects. This would be very helpfull for my projects : DATV repeater with mux functions.

When do you plan to release the source code of the FPGA for this project? Even in "beta" state?

It would be interesting to port Digilite ZL on this hardware made by FTDI, which already includes the FTDI Chip, and an Altera FPGA. The final board would be even simpler! Do you think that this would be possible?
http://www.ftdichip.com/Support/Documen ... -IC-II.pdf

Thank you for all your answers!

Leon - French hobbyist

[Vicky003]

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[markaren1]

Hi Leon,

Thank you for the link to the MORPH, that looks very interesting, and relevant.

FPGA source code has been published, see a http://www.idesignz.org/DigiLiteZL_FPGA ... L-FPGA.htm (linked from main page).

I hope to get back to DigiLiteZL soon, currently rather busy with contract work and the odd earthquake.

Regards,

Mark Atherton,
New Zealand

[Leon]

Do you think that it would be possible to use a D/A converter like the AD9761 with the Digilite ZL FPGA code?
This would allow us to use a digital filter (inside the FPGA) for the I/Q signals, instead of the analog filter that is on the board. Therefore, this filter could be configurable via the soft. This is important if we want to use a wide range of symbol rates.

Leon.

[markaren1]

Do you think that it would be possible to use a D/A converter like the AD9761 with the Digilite ZL FPGA code?
This would allow us to use a digital filter (inside the FPGA) for the I/Q signals, instead of the analog filter that is on the board. Therefore, this filter could be configurable via the soft. This is important if we want to use a wide range of symbol rates.

Leon.

Hi Leon,

Yes, Ben has been talking about doing this.

If you can get some real hardware together I suggest you email him and get going. Contact details for him are on the FPGA page at the bottom.

Regards,

Mark