Reading the serial number for a Decklink HD/Intensity pro via SDK

[Bob Haber]

I could use something like this too, though right now I don’t have multiple cards, I probably will eventually. I doubt the serial number is actually encoded anywhere in the card, but it might be possible to figure out what PCI slot or USB controller the device is connected to. You can enumerate the PCI devices in the system but I don’t know any way to associate that information with the IDeckLink data structure you get from the IDeckLinkIterator.

I guess, you could hope that the installed cards are always returned by the IDeckLinkIterator in the same order. I wouldn’t be too surprised to find that actually is the case.

If your cards happen to have serial ports on them, you could probably query the attributes for the associated com port name and use that to distinguish one card from another, but obviously this would only work with serial-enabled cards and not Intensity cards.

Failing all these things I guess you could trace into the API’s DLL and hope to uncover some undocumented feature.

[Daniel Moore]

Hi Folks,

the iterator always returns the boards in the same order. At the moment,
there is no unique identifier available for the boards, so using the iterator
is your best bet.

Please contact Blackmagic Developer Support at developer@blackmagic-design.com for
any DirectShow or other development related issues.

cheers

Daniel

[Thanh Vuong]

Sorry I was told to post my message here when I called Blackmagic support.

Those enumerated values won’t help me if I’m looking at building a lot of units loaded with these cards. I’ll be sitting there all day trying to figure out where the feeding is coming in from. Plus what happens if 1 of the units don’t register? All the enumerated values would shift wouldn’t they?

Anyways I’ll contact the developers to see if they have a solution.

Thanks,

[Bob Haber]

If all the systems are identical then there’s a good chance the enumeration will always be in the same order (based on PCI slot position probably) over all systems.

If one of the cards failed for some reason and didn’t appear in the enumeration then it would mess up the ordering but it would also be easily noticed because you would have the wrong number of results. In this case you might want to abort anyway.

If the ordering does turn out not to be predictable in advance then determining the configuration may just have to be part of the installation. Since this is obviously not a consumer installation you may just need to have the installer figure it out and set configuration during setup.

It’s not ideal but nobody is going to know which physical card is which from some sort of identifier code anyway so you aren’t really losing anything.