• Blackmagic Design

  Multiple Decklink HD Extreme in Single Machine

  Posted by Grimlock on November 17, 2006 at 1:09 pm

  I’ve seen this requested numerous times, but I’m interested in understanding what must be overcome to bring this feature to fruition. Our machine has two PCIe Decklink HD Extreme boards successfully installed, each with updated firmware, latest drivers (5.7.3), running on XP 32bit. However, there seems to be no way of identifying the second card or switching between them.

  Perhaps there are registry hacks available to give addresses to each of the installed cards, or some non-robust alpha technique that isn’t dependable yet, but might sometimes work….? Has *anyone* has had *any* success with this?

  We are working on a system to import video streams from two ultrasound medical machines simultaneously so that we may apply signal processing algorithms to extract extra position information of targets in the field of view of the ultrasound probes, somewhat like some radar systems do. Having multiple machines with such large amounts of data to be moved around is a real hassle, and less than elegant. Bringing it all to one machine is very desirable….

  I’m to the point of trying to run XenSource as the base “hypervisor” operating system, and then running two instances of the Windows XP operating system within it, and make one card available to one OS install, and the second to the other (by disabling in Hardware Manager). If I get this to work, I’ll let you all know.

  I think there are a many legitimate reasons to have more than one capture card work within a single operating sytem. Here might be a great time to revisit the idea of a driver for Linux, if it’s Windows multimedia constructs that are getting in the way of things….

  Just looking for some feedback on status, and how I might be able to contribute.

  Thanks.

  Kristian Lam replied 19 years, 10 months ago 2 Members · 1 Reply
• 1 Reply

• 

  Kristian Lam

  November 20, 2006 at 4:01 am

  Hi,

  It’s actually possible right now via DirectShow with our Windows driver. This means that developers writing custom applications can access more than one DeckLink card in a single system. Unfortunately, this is not supported in the NLEs out there in the market place so it still seems like only one card is supported.

  It sounds like you’re rolling your own application. If you’re running into difficulties accessing more than one card, please write to me (support[at]blackmagic-design.com) and I’ll direct you to the relevant resources.

  regards

  Kristian Lam
  Blackmagic Design

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