GPL'd Driver and Linux Support For New H.264 Capture Card

azop writes "Almost a year ago Slashdot covered the story of a MPEG-4 multiple input capture card with a GPL Video4Linux licensed driver. Earlier this year, Ben Collins added H.264 support into the solo6x10 Video4Linux2 GPL driver. The H.264 PCIe cards are finally released and shipping to customers. The new cards support faster frame rates and sport a PCIe interface. The driver is available for forkin' on Github."

Re:Software / Firmware

[GPLHost-Thomas]

At Debian, we do care about binary blob firmware without source. We put them in "non-free", and we don't consider it's part of the OS (it wont go in the released CD, etc.).

patents

[shentino]

Good show.

But all the open source drivers in the world won't mean diddly squat if the h264 patent pool gets in the way.

Re:patents

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

My understanding, from TFPR, is that the card does h.246 encoding onboard(and the manufacturer of the card has paid their protection money to the MPEG LA) so the driver has no h.246 related duties, it just configures the card and collects the encoded output.

Obviously, since the output is h.246, it'll need to be decoded for use, which does raise the patent issue; but not at the driver level.

Re:Software / Firmware

[Anonymous Coward]

From their site:

"Update: June 7th, 2011 - Several important things to note, the BC-H series H.264 cards do not have at traditional firmware that is loaded. Everything is accessed directly from the driver / user space applications. Secondly, we report sales of each encoder to MPEGLA and pay any necessary patent fees for the sale of each encoder, meaning that any cards purchased from Bluecherry already have the patent protection from MPEGLA for the device level encoder."

So, in this case the discussion is moot - this card doesn't need any shady things to run on my computer - i am getting one!