Deck Link cards and Linux

[Ramona Howard]

Not really the forum for this but here is a brief response, if you wish to discuss further, please post on the AJA or Linux forum.

The use of Linux may be considered a niche market, although Linux can be found in every top studio worldwide. Used on servers for years Linux has begun to make it’s way to the desktop.

Here is a link with a huge list of products that are available on the Linux OS

https://www.spectsoft.com/wiki/RaveManual/Solutions/Film/FilmsusingLinux

Although this industry will find it’s desktop editing market mostly on MAC, Windows and AVID, Linux plays a huge role in the studio for compositing, animation and rendering. As to I/O boards, since not many high-end editing packages exist on the platform, companies traditionally have not supported I/O in Linux (to name only one of the issues) and to fill the niche that we all talk about companies such as us(SpectSoft)have written our own Linux driver to fill the need rather than asking the hardware company to do so.

Asking a company for support to a very small percentage of sales for the Linux market is something that you will find not easily welcomed. One must understand that a driver in Linux is not supported the same as in MAC or Windows. Due to the various distros, code must be available to the end-user to re-compile OR you need to have multiple drivers to support the multiple distros. Companies are not to keen in opening that code up just yet and the percentage of sales prevents them from supporting multiple drivers.

Dollar for dollar a product on Linux will still give you better value longterm and unlimited options than that of a proprietary product. This is why so many studios have gone this route.

Hope that helps a bit,

Ramona

[Raphael Jacquot]

I found that the company DVEO offers linux supported hardware with GPLd drivers

see https://www.dveo.com/broadcast/PCI-PCIe-HDSDI-In-Out-Cards.html