Prevue Guide Forums

I'm getting an AP2000 (Amiga 2000 with Prevue labels, UV genlock, UV audio switcher, and UV satellite cards) on Monday. No new software, unfortunately, but hopefully we can finally get some insight into the hardware side of things. Will post plenty of pictures and observations when I get it

Hopefully I'll be finished with the commitments I made pretty soon so that I can finally finish off the Prevue Data Server (probably with rudyvalencia)

AriX wrote:I'm getting an AP2000 (Amiga 2000 with Prevue labels, UV genlock, UV audio switcher, and UV satellite cards) on Monday. No new software, unfortunately, but hopefully we can finally get some insight into the hardware side of things. Will post plenty of pictures and observations when I get it

Hopefully I'll be finished with the commitments I made pretty soon so that I can finally finish off the Prevue Data Server (probably with rudyvalencia)

Sounds pretty sweet. Not to jump ahead too far, but is a video feed even possible, and if so how would it operate?

Bolt96 wrote:

AriX wrote:I'm getting an AP2000 (Amiga 2000 with Prevue labels, UV genlock, UV audio switcher, and UV satellite cards) on Monday. No new software, unfortunately, but hopefully we can finally get some insight into the hardware side of things. Will post plenty of pictures and observations when I get it

Hopefully I'll be finished with the commitments I made pretty soon so that I can finally finish off the Prevue Data Server (probably with rudyvalencia)

Sounds pretty sweet. Not to jump ahead too far, but is a video feed even possible, and if so how would it operate?

You mean a video stream to the internet of my AP2000? That probably could be done - I could run it on my old laptop.

AriX wrote:

Bolt96 wrote:

AriX wrote:I'm getting an AP2000 (Amiga 2000 with Prevue labels, UV genlock, UV audio switcher, and UV satellite cards) on Monday. No new software, unfortunately, but hopefully we can finally get some insight into the hardware side of things. Will post plenty of pictures and observations when I get it

Hopefully I'll be finished with the commitments I made pretty soon so that I can finally finish off the Prevue Data Server (probably with rudyvalencia)

Sounds pretty sweet. Not to jump ahead too far, but is a video feed even possible, and if so how would it operate?

You mean a video stream to the internet of my AP2000? That probably could be done - I could run it on my old laptop.

Not exactly what I meant but it still would be cool too see your Amiga on a stream. I meant like a video feed that has all the movie trailers, Prevue idents, and all that stuff. Would it be possible for a feed like that to be setup, and sent to emulated/real Amigas?

That's something that is at the back of my mind to do. I figure my myth box that is collecting the EPG data will also be able to record current promos. The icing on the cake will be that I am hopeful it will be able to run on my Amiga A4000T it has an mpeg card so hopefully it should manage it.

Otherwise I was planning to implement it with flash or maybe REBOL.

However of course these will be pretty useless until we get the 110 baud working.

Btw congrats on the score arix!!

Bolt96 wrote:Not exactly what I meant but it still would be cool too see your Amiga on a stream. I meant like a video feed that has all the movie trailers, Prevue idents, and all that stuff. Would it be possible for a feed like that to be setup, and sent to emulated/real Amigas?

Hmm, great idea. I have set up that feed before, as I wrote one for my Prevue simulator in Quartz Composer that is quite extensible. Maybe I could stream that to the internet along with the Prevue data server. We'll see!

tin wrote:That's something that is at the back of my mind to do. I figure my myth box that is collecting the EPG data will also be able to record current promos. The icing on the cake will be that I am hopeful it will be able to run on my Amiga A4000T it has an mpeg card so hopefully it should manage it.

I have the same MythTV installation as you, but the problem is, how the heck could MythTV figure out what a promo is?

tin wrote:However of course these will be pretty useless until we get the 110 baud working.

Btw congrats on the score arix!!

Well, not completely useless - we can generate the overlays ourselves until the time comes (although obviously it'd be much cooler with the 110 baud).

AriX wrote: I have the same MythTV installation as you, but the problem is, how the heck could MythTV figure out what a promo is?

I'm hoping to use the commercial detection, but it will still need a bit of manual intervention to actually cut out and use the promos. It might not be all that good in all honesty!

Got it! It's petty cool, but I didn't get a chance to take pictures last night.

I didn't have a 25-pin serial cable, so I couldn't really do much with it, but I'm getting one today

UPDATE: Aaaaannnddd, I bought the wrong one. Gotta wait to get some gender changers :p

A few thoughts. First, both the "Audio Demod/Switcher" card and the data demodulator card are produced by Zephyrus, and are "Model 101 Rev C". Therefore, I'm pretty sure that the company Zephyrus has basically all of the information we need to figure this out. I contacted them a few months ago, and they said that they couldn't talk about it, since they're still under NDA. I talked to one of the people at UV that had worked with Zephyrus to develop these cards, and he said that it was silly they wouldn't help me out, and that he would tell them to send me an email - he must have forgotten, or it didn't work out or something, since I never got a follow-up, but one thing I could try is contacting them again.

How do I know that these cards are what we need? Well, the signal comes into the data demodulator, which splits it in two and listens on two different frequencies - one for the 110 baud feed and one for the 2400/9600 baud feed. Both feeds likely use modem-like tones - I'm not sure how exactly it works, but my guess is that at some point on the card, each modem-like stream is converted to serial data and thrown onto the pins of the serial port. This means that the card itself knows how to generate the 110-baud bit-banging protocol they use, unless the card is more of a passthrough that takes in the modem stream and just converts it directly to a serial feed without any active processing. (I don't know anything about serial communications, so I hope I didn't get anything grossly wrong here/not understand what the heck I'm talking about.)

Another thing I want to know more about is the audio switcher card and how it knows what audio stream to switch to. Is it through some sort of "contact-closure signaling" with those two extra cables as swest suggested? Does it happen over serial to the demodulator, which then passes it to the audio switcher over the ISA bus as tin suggested, or maybe somehow over the RF cable going between the demod and audio switcher cards?
There's really only one way to find out, and that is to try it - but I'm not sure what sort of modulator I can use to get the audio at the required frequency (5.8, 6.2, and 6.8 MHz). I'll have to do some research into this, or maybe someone here can help me out.

I'm really confused about the genlock card ("UVGEN"). The top BNC port is obviously input, and it works perfectly. The one below it is clearly output, and it also works fine. The oddity here is the last port on the bottom, which I believe we had previously speculated could be a VCR input for ad insertion. When I plug an input into it, nothing happens, but when I plug it into my TV's input, I get a black-and-white version of the guide, and without whatever is currently being overlaid with the genlock. Kind of odd... Maybe the software somehow sets it as an input when it is ready for a local ad insertion?