I have been thinking about a project that could use our hardware, assuming that it has a set of 4 or more S-Video In ports. This is probably many more than most people would ever need, so I think that we probably don't want to include nearly that many on the board itself.
What I am proposing instead is an extension box, that either connects to the top or bottom or is attached via a cable, which has many more Inputs and/or Outputs than the base system. This will allow for more flexibility and possibly even support the ethervideo as a full blown multimedia hub (just think one of those big receiver units plugged in to the unit and acting as an extension for I/O). If we can pass things through the digital domain (duh), it could even act as a multichannel TV/Cable recorder. This also allows us to include only the features that we really need to in order to have a usable product in the first spec, confident that any idea we forgot can easily be added to an external device. Does anybody else think this is a reasonable idea? I would say that probably to attach the peripherals via USB or Firewire (but then there is the issue of protocol headache), but SATA cabling or something similar might work. It would be best if it was not a cable that would be confused for an input/output for normal use of the system, but still be sturdy and bandwidth capable enough for our purposes. Just looking at wikipedia, our only other good choices are Cat 5, Fibre/BNC, and HDMI. If we were to support both input and output, which is the ideal situation, the best choices are Cat 5, Firewire/USB, and SATA. These allow us to stay somewhat standards compliant and still have a robust, reliable interface. My personal choice would be Firewire -- we can enable the peripherals as desktop companions as well, it is really reliable (and could probably even power the devices, esp. with Firewire 800), and it is faster than pretty much any other option (the FW800 spec goes up to 3.2Gbits, so uncompressed 1080p60 just fits, and we can get up to 13 SDTV feeds). In that case, would we want the extension port to be the same as the firewire port for camcorders and hard drives, or should we include two ports? Thoughts? nick _______________________________________________ Open-hardware-ethervideo mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-hardware-ethervideo
