Latest News

  • SCTE-35 and SCTE-104 VANC Processing

    March 14, 2017

    One of the things we’ve been spending a lot of time on recently is related to Ad Insertion for broadcasters. This includes providing the appropriate metadata in streams to denote when advertisements should begin and end, as well as information describing which advertisements should be inserted. This largely delves into the realm of the SCTE-35 specification. While we won’t describe the entire spec here, we will discuss some of the use cases we’ve been working on. You can freely download the full specification from the SCTE website. The particular use cases we care about involve taking raw HD-SDI feeds from broadcasters in ...
  • Massive Capture for Mac OSX Now Available

    June 22, 2016

    Kernel Labs is happy to announce the release of Massive Capture, our new Mac OSX capturing application. Massive Capture is a software application which allows users the ability to capture video content from multiple video sources simultaneously, by intelligently controlling multiple attached HDPVR capture devices. The application itself is built on top of our current HDPVR 2 SDK platform and is designed to streamline the capture process. Supporting up to 16 simultaneous capturing devices, all being controlled independently, Massive Capture is ideal for Commercial Digitization or Archival organizations. More information about the application can be found on our Massive Capture for Mac OSX ...
  • NAB 2016 Conference

    April 14, 2016

    Kernel Labs will be attending the National Association of Broadcasters Show 2015 conference, Apr 16-21 2016 in Las Vegas. If you’d like to meet the Kernel Labs staff then you can reach us via the Contact page. We’d be thrilled to chat with you.
  • CableExplorer – Evaluation Software

    February 29, 2016

    For those of you who are Digital TV enthusiasts, and have access to a Silicondust HDHomeRun prime cable receiver, we’ve been developing an ‘explorer’ tool for sometime. The software works with OS-X only, although Linux and Windows would be easy enough for us to deliver in the future. We’ve just published a free eval version, called CableExplorer. I suspect one of two of you may like to see it. CableExplorer lets you probe your RF signal, look at your RF power across the entire plan, gather various stats about your cable signal and stream quality, CCI states etc, watch/monitor copy freely content, ...
  • New Linux Drivers and SDK’s Now Available

    December 2, 2015

    Here at Kernel Labs we have been working hard over the last couple of months to bring some new additions to our product range. We have recently released new Linux drivers and SDK’s for a variety of popular capturing devices. For more information on the Linux drivers, click on the links below .. AVerMedia CE330B HD Linux Driver AVerMedia CM313B Linux Driver AVerMedia DarkCrystal HD CD530 Linux Driver AVerMedia Game Recorder HD C985 Linux Driver AVerMedia Mini Card HD C353 Linux Driver For more information on the SDK’s, click on the links below .. AVerMedia LGP Lite SDK AVerMedia LGP C875 SDK DekTec DTU-351 SDK GrabBee-HD USB SDK Hauppauge HDPVR 2 SDK Hauppauge ...
  • Elgato Game Capture HD 60 Pro Teardown

    October 6, 2015

    Devin pointed out a new PCIe HD compression card the other day, the $200 Elgato Game Capture HD 60 Pro PCIe card. Amazon Link Video capture, video encoders, compressors, that’s our bread and butter here at Kernel Labs, needless to say we ordered the unit and promptly took it apart – for your viewing pleasure! Out of the box, it looks like this: The back panel: Here’s an image you might like: And another: Basic Components: MST3367CMK HDMI Receiver ITE 61221 HDMI Transmitter Vatics Mozart 395s H.264 compressor / PCIe bridge. 2 x Samsung ...
  • HVR-955q Linux Driver Performance

    August 5, 2015

    Over the years we have assembled a variety of tools for evaluting tuner performance. Most of these are internal home-grown command line utilities and scripts which perform some superset of comparable end-user applications, with a particular emphasis on automation and logging statistics that regular users typically wouldn’t need. We use these tools for a variety of purposes: Comparison of various products to assess performance (to aid product selection for our commercial customers) Validation of drivers under development in terms of reliability and performance Detecting regressions during development (i.e. the ability to run an automated suite against the same driver regularly to identify cases ...
  • MythTV and Hauppauge Colossus

    June 19, 2015

    While Kernel Labs has been shipping a driver for the Hauppauge Colossus for a couple of years now, we have generally been focused entirely on the use cases that commercial parties care about, and these tend to be things like gStreamer, ffmpeg, and VLC. However in the last few days I finally got around to trying out the driver with a stock MythTV system, and the results were pretty interesting. It didn’t work on the first try. I guess this wasn’t too surprising given the rats nest of V4L2 capture code in the MythTV backend. Note that I’m ...
  • VLC Output Thread Performance Profiling

    June 7, 2015

    Over the last couple of years I did a number of projects where the client approached me with a question along the lines of: “Why do I get severe video stuttering and dropped frames in VLC when trying to play stream XYZ?” In some cases it was an issue specific to some feature (such as closed captions or subtitles), in other cases the issue was specific to some platform (e.g. VDPAU playback, VA-API, low-end platforms with slow CPUs, etc). Over time I developed a bit of methodology for debugging such issues, which I will share here. First off, how do we objectively ...
  • Kernel Labs Linux driver for Avermedia Dark Crystal HD Duo

    May 2, 2015

    Among some of our commercial capture customers we have seen a trend where they are trying to get higher density out of their existing HD capture rigs. As a result, we’re happy to announce that we now have a Linux driver for the Avermedia Dark Crystal HD Duo (Model C129). We really like this board as it allows for *dual* HDMI raw capture via a single PCIe slot, making it great for 1U chassis configurations where you want to capture/analyze two channels at the same time. And of course for systems with multiple slots, it could potentially double ...