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Decklink/hdlink issues
Hello, I’ve recently purchased a decklink pro HD, and HDlink, for use with a PC sata raid array and display onto a standard def broadcast monitor and the dell 24″ lcd via hdlink
been having a couple of issues since I got them and was wondering if anyone here might have any ideas…
1) the colour output to my broadcast monitor isn’t very stable – getting this horrible soft green bar down the left of the screen, and colours are bleeding all over the place – (I think this could well be due to a bad cable I’m using… so I’m not sure this is worth bothering you about – will have to test further) this comes and goes, every now and then… as I said – it’s probably the cables, but it *might* be the board itself…
more importantly however are issues with the Hdlink – I’ve only got it up and running in the last week and have run into a pretty serious problem;
2) the hdlink doesn’t seem to work at all at HD rez. It works fine at standard def (which is exactly what I don’t need since I have a broadcast monitor) give or take a bit of ugly interlacing, but when I switch to HD it flickers on for a moment, then goes black, then on and off a couple of times, then black for a few seconds – this process seems to cycle continously with the picture briefly appearing, then disappearing over and over again.
The thing is, I have yet to upgrade my motherboard to the one using the correct pci-x 100/133mhz bus speed for realtime HD playback so I’m currently stuck with pci-X 66mhz, which doesn’t have the throughput for realtime HD, but surely it should give a stable display of stills or even the desktop at HD rez when playback is paused….? or does it need the pci-x 100+ speed to display at all? anyone else have similar problems?
I’ve delayed getting a new motherboard because it seems really hard to find a motherboard that supports all the stuff I need – xeon 2.8’s, sata, pci-x 133, agp (dont want to upgrade my graphics card again) usb2 etc etc. I havent found one that does everything, and I’m still trying to figure the best compromise in terms of replacing the least parts cheaply if I cant find one that supports the lot…
the motherboard specs are fine to work at standard def – it’s a bus speed/data throughput issue preventing it working at HD res, not a display issue – since displaying a still image supposedly requires no data throughput, I can’t imagine the bus speed has anything to do with even still images displaying on the hdlink (but I guess I could be wrong)
any ideas?
cheers in advance,
Ruair -
2 Replies
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Hi Ruairi,
The DeckLink HD series cards were designed to be used with a 100 or 133 MHz PCI-X bus and are unlikely to be compatible with a 66 MHz PCI-X bus for HD resolutions as that is just too slow. Furthermore, we don’t test with the 66 MHz PCI-X bus so I don’t know how good it might be for use even with SD video. For guaranteed reliability, I would suggest using a 64-bit PCI slot for SD video as we test with 64-bit PCI slots in addition to 100 and 133 MHz PCI-X slots as specified on the Windows minimum system requirements technical note. The exception to this is that 32-bit slots are fine in the Dual Core systems that we have tested.
This should help to send good video to HDLink. It would be nice if you could verify that everything is working fine with HDLink by hooking it up to another source, eg the SDI output of a HD deck.
Finally, good quality cables are always important and the cable you use for HD-SDI is also extremely important and so we’ve posted some cable recommendations in a technical note.
Regards,
Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design -
>>>>>>>The DeckLink HD series cards were designed to be used with a 100 or 133 MHz PCI-X bus and are unlikely to be compatible with a 66 MHz PCI-X bus for HD resolutions as that is just too slow. Furthermore, we don’t test with the 66 MHz PCI-X bus so I don’t know how good it might be for use even with SD video.>>>>>
well the board meets the specs for SD video according to your docs
PCI slots
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