Help! Tegra/Linux and SDI video Input

It’s almost 3 years that I’m following the embedded computing eco-system, looking for a cheap way to encode in real time a video signal from ad SDI HD-SDI source to an H.264 stream.
I tried Pandaboard, RaspberryPi, Cubieboard, and many others. All of them are supposed to have the “hardware” feature to support the H.264 encoding but none of them can reach the Highprofile 1080p@30fps that I need. (In the paper they are supposed to, but…)

Finally I discovered the Nvidia product line to support embedded design. Tegra is the right “tool” to perform encoding and nv_omx_h264enc is just marvelous!

The problem is that I’m still facing the “SDI-OUTPUT” problem. Despite my continue efforts i’m still failing at finding a way to input an SDI signal to one of these boards.

I know there is a Gstreamer SDI demux (working for the blackmagic decklink cards) but,unfortunately all of these cards are PCI-E or does not support Linux!

I guess if there could be a way to ingest SPI video in the SPI, or if there’s another possible solution.

Regards
Salvatore

In addition to mini-PCIe the Jetson has USB 3.0. I don’t know anything about the topic but there seem to be some SDI products for both although the drivers can be an issue.

Hi Salvatore,

Toradex showed such a solution at the Embedded Technology Conference in Yokohama a couple of weeks ago.
It contains an Apalis T30 Computer Module with an Nvidia Tegra 3 and a small FPGA connected via PCIe. The PCIe solution works well under Linux and you you can get the drivers for it.
I recommend to get in touch with Toradex for more details.
[url]Embedded Computing | Our Products - Toradex

There are also a chip form intersil (TW6874) which allows you to connect an SDI input with a parallel camera interface found on the Nvidia Tegra 2 and 3 and other SoCs. This could be a solution in some cases however this will limit your input bandwidth.