TI Davinci boards

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So, after digging the internets for a hardware solution for H264 encoder (as alternative to Maxim chips) I found TI chips, called "Davinci". Im totally change my developing way from boring reverse-engineering of hardware to "just make it works" with gstreamer pipelines. Yes, this devices may be a little more expensive compared to others, but "freedom - is not free".

First, I found that this chips used at D-Link DVS-310-1. After dump NAND flash, I found a linux kernel+fs and a huge binary, called AVServer. It created by old MontaVista SDK and the PCB - is OEM from APPRO. More info about this videoserver You can find at openwrt wiki page. But the video ADC (TVP5150AM1) can't start with open-source realisation of TI DVEVM SDK due dlink developers used non-standard pin-connections to video capture frontend.

After I found a cheap dev-board with TI DaVinci DM3xx: LeopardBoard. It's very interesting for creation custom camera design or videoconferencing device, even with echo-cancelation!

But even here I found proprietary part of code, it's RidgeRun's code for automatic sensor tuning (white balance, auto-exposure, auto-focus, etc.). But if You need just capturing from some analogue source, you may buy one of two boards:

SD-capture daughter-board with TVP5146 - it able to capture from S-Video or Composite
HD-board (TVP7002) - capturing from component Y-Pb-Pr input.

More info about daughterboards, avaliable for LeopardBoard are in leopardimaging website.

It even able to output video through HDMI with a small additional board (720p or 1080p).

Only one thing that makes me sad - is deinterlacing. The chip does not containg deinterlace hardware at-all. The only way to remove interlace artifacts - is to skip one of two frames. But in this way - the video frame size is divided by two, so the max quality - is 352x288 for interlaced video. Same problem I found in "Blackmagic Video Recorder" device.

So the main problem for this little capture devices - is absence of deinterlacing algo. A little hope gives BeagleBoard-xM, that utilize of Davinci DM3730 1Ghz CPU with NEON SIMD. The guys from TI says that it able to deinterlace in hardware, but even if it's not so, we have NEON instructions to do it fast in software.

P.S. The additional daughterboard that MUST BE - is HDMI-input, for example with AD9880 chip, but it does not exists yet.