I’m extremely pleased to share that Tim ‘mithro’ Ansell’s HDMI2USB project (part of his bigger TimVideos.us project) has committed to supporting NeTV2’s "libre mode."

TimVideos.us is a group of open source projects that facilitate the recording and live streaming of talks at conferences and user groups. HDMI2USB project is a sub-project that has long out-grown its original name — think of it more as a general video-to-stream conversion FPGA codebase whose capabilities morph depending upon the ports available in the target hardware. As a result, the FPGA codebase has the ability to take in HDMI, DVI, or DisplayPort and turn it into USB, Ethernet, and now with the NeTV2, PCI-express. Find out more about Tim’s projects by watching his talk at Teardown 2018.

There’s a wonderful back story behind this collaboration. Apparently, Tim got into doing FPGA designs with video in part due to the original NeTV that I released several years back as open source hardware. He developed the fantastic HDMI2USB infrastructure, spawned dev boards, and helped to mature the LiteX build framework. I then adopted migen/LiteX and a large portion of the HDMI2USB firmware for the NeTV2. And now, because I’ve adopted the frameworks he’s built, he can readily adopt the new hardware I’m building as a target for his application, unlocking a whole new user community for the NeTV2. This is a rich example of the powerful outcomes enabled by community-oriented development.

Speaking of which, we’re looking for a couple developers to help get data from the water’s edge of NeTV2 and into the rest of Linux. In particular, we could use someone to help build the encoding pipelines on the host CPU side once the video has made it across the PCI-express bus, perhaps using Gstreamer/V4l2. We’re also looking for someone who can implement the right driver for moving data directly between the GPU and NeTV2. Such a driver might use KMS and DMA-BUF/PRIME, but perhaps there are more efficient methods available. I’m more than happy to provide free early access hardware in exchange for git commits!

If you happen to know someone who’s willing to help, give either @bunniestudios or @mithro a shout on Twitter.