Linux1394: Links and Related software

Links and Related software

Links

Standards and Specifications

1394 Trade Association:
The official industry consortium behind 1394 technology. They house specifications for AV/C and other stuff.
The 1394 OHCI Specification Release 1.1:
Look here for the most in depth technical information about IEEE 1394 technology, or at least as it applies to OHCI. At least it is free, whereas you must purchase the IEEE specification.
IEEE Std 1394-1995 - Description
IEEE Std 1394b-2002 (Amendment to IEEE Std 1394-1995)
The Serial Bus Protocol 2 (SBP-2) Specification:
This is where you order (i.e., purchase) the SBP-2 standard from ANSI.
Instrumentation and Industrial Control Digital Camera (IIDC) Specification ver. 1.30:
This specification covers uncompressed video and camera control (focus, format, pan, zoom, white balance, etc.).
SBP-3 (proposed) (PDF)
Information about the next generation of the storage standard Serial Bus Protocol. This version adds isochronous support to serial bus protocols particularly for A/V applications.

Vendor Information

1394 Controllers at TI:
Texas Instruments' (TI) technical overview of IEEE 1394. TI is the most popular maker of OHCI compliant chipsets as well as the PCILynx.
Apple's FireWire portal
Microsoft's perspective
Papers and articles from Skipstone:
Skipstone has a decent collection of technical overviews and propoganda.
Linux Media Labs LML1394:
Linux Media Labs manufactures a number of video peripherals for the Linux platform. The LML1394 is their OHCI adapter card.
169time.com Advantage VX-1:
169time.com products enable the time shifting (recording) of Digital and true High Definition TV signals from both satellite and OTA broadcasts using the convenience and low cost of video tape. Their Advantage VX products converts the DirecTV HD output from their HDVR product into a standard MPEG2-TS stream that can be recorded to a D-VHS deck with 1394.
DFG/1394-1:
The Imaging Source has an interesting new uncompressed video capture device called DFG/1394-1. The link above is to a custom driver that also has a video4linux2 interface.
Oracle Technology Network Project: FireWire:
Information and software for sharing disks for clusters.

Individuals

Stefan Richter:
Stefan Richter has been an avid support member of the Linux 1394 team for a few years, especially in the area of SBP-2. More recently, he has taken an active role in the maintenance of the kernel modules. His site contains various patches where ideas are staged and tested pending a merge into the kernel, and it contains patchsets where ieee1394 changes are backported to recently released kernels.
Dan Dennedy:
Dan Dennedy is very active in Linux 1394 and related applications. He has a blog where he sometimes mentions latest activity and developments.
Bill Alexander's IEEE 1394 programming page:
This engineer works for LSILogic (who acquired Symbios) and has written articles for Dr. Dobb's with downloadable source, including an article about how to read configuration ROM using the Linux OHCI driver.
Richard Akerman's Links:
Richard is a CS student working on a 1394/Jini masters project. He has a comprehensive list of information and links.

Related Software

Utilities
amdtpplay:	Manfred Weihs and Christian Gemeiner have created a tool called amdtpplay that plays an audio stream received from the a 1394 IEC 61883-6 audio device through the sound card. An example of a 61883-6 audio device is the Sony LISSA.
dvbackup:	A command-line utility to backup any kind of data to a DV camcorder, written by Peter Schlaile who has worked on DV transmission over 1394 and the encoder in libdv.
dvgrab:	Utility to grab DV from camcorder into AVI files.
DVTS:	DVTS is Digital Video Transport System, a collection of utilities for Linux, FreeBSDM and MacOSX, to send DV data over an IP network. You can use this, for example, with ethernet to overcome the current limitations with 1394 cable length.
Endpoint:	From Oracle, Endpoint provides Firewire disk emulation. Endpoint turns a Linux machine with one or more firewire cards into an SBP-2 device.
firecontrol (was ieee1394commander):	Manfred Weihs developed a simple console oriented tool based on libraw1394 to issue asynchronous read, write and lock commands to some nodes on the bus as well as to force bus resets. The main advantage of this tool over other available tools (like gscanbus) is (besides not requiring a graphical interface), that it reports the exact acknowledge and response codes and therefore is very useful for debugging purposes.
firescope:	A Firewire version of the xmon kernel monitoring/debugging tool for PPC. In the words of Benjamin Herrenschmidt, the author: So basically, my rsync kernel has the necessary support in it as of today (look at the bits in CONFIG_XMON_FW in arch/ppc/xmon/start.c), and the client tool can be downloaded from http://gate.crashing.org/~benh/firescope.tar.gz. The protocol is a bit basic (pmu like ? :) and currently, xmon don't like "losing" the link with firescope. That is, any xmon output should properly reach firescope at any time, but if xmon didn't have firescope attached when trying to _read_ (when entered), then it will continue to either ADB or serial code and will miss firewire completely. I will try to fix that one of these days so that xmon can take input from all possible sources at the same time.
gscanbus:	Utility to display connected devices and do transactions.
ieee1394diag:	IEEE1394Diag is a GUI application that presents a graphical view of an IEEE1394 network and provides the ability to perform common low-level 1394 operations.
mpeg2ts1394dec:	This program for Linux receives MPEG-2 transport streams from an IEEE 1394 (FireWire) bus according to IEC 61883-4. It can decode one audio and video stream and present them on the local sound card and on the local display.
mpg1394grab:	mpg1394grab is a Sony MicroMV capture utility. It works great with VideoLAN client.
Programming Libraries
Camwire:	A layer atop libdc1394 that provides higher level interface.
libavc1394:	A library to control A/V devices using the 1394ta AV/C commands. This library also contains librom1394 for reading and decoding the CSR Config ROM of any device on the bus.
libdc1394:	libdc1394 is a library that is intended to provide a high level programming interface for application developers who wish to control IEEE 1394 based cameras that conform to the 1394-based Digital Camera Specification (found at http://www.1394ta.org/). A libdc1394 FAQ is available.
libiec61883:	An implementation of the most relevant parts of IEC 61883 over libraw1394 for transmission, reception. and mangement of media streams and devices such as DV, MPEG2-TS, audio, and MIDI.
Applications
Cinelerra:	A fully featured GPL video editor with builtin DV capture support.
Coriander:	A GPL graphical application that lets you control all of the features of an IEEE-1394 Digital Camera, see video, save or ftp images, and connect to a Real streaming server.
dv1394d:	A GPL video server TCP daemon and client library that uses dv1394 for multiple simultaneous transmissions over a single bus using private isochronous channels.
Kino:	An easy-to-use GPL DV non-linear editing with excellent support for DV/1394 and AV/C.
Other
FreeBoB:	Drivers for BeBoB-based AMDTP devices for Jack, the definitive GNU/Linux professional audio server.
gstreamer:	gstreamer is a plugin multimedia architecture for Linux and potentially other POSIX systems. It includes a dv1394src source plugin and a libdv decoder plugin. In the future, there will be more plugins supporting Linux 1394.