Magewell Pro Capture Family Card

Quick User Guide for Linux

Copyright 2011–2016 Nanjing Magewell Electronics Co., Ltd. All rights reserved.

Revised 04/20/2016

1 Introduction

Magewell Pro Capture Family cards are used for capturing different types of HD video & audio signals.

The PCIe input interface supports PCIe 2.0 standard. The Pro Capture Family cards adopt the modular design,

so custom design can be quickly made to meet special requirement. The cards support a universal drive and

a universal SDK. In terms of the function, performance, user experience and compatibility, Pro Capture Family

has been much improved compared to the First Generation Devices.

2 Product Install

two kinds of PCIe Interface :x1 and x4. x1 cards can be inserted into x1,x4,x8 or x16 PCI Express slot on

the motherboard ; x4 card can insert into x4, x8 or x16 PCI Express slot on the motherboard;Pro Capture

Mini cards can only insert into the Mini PCIe slot, not the mSATA slot);

3 Driver Install

3.1 Driver Installation Introduction

This section mainly introduces how to install the driver of the Pro Capture Series Card on Linux.

3.2 Driver Installation

4 ToolKit software

This section mainly introduces how to use the common software on Linux.

Pro Capture Series Card adopts modular design and all the capture channel on the card can be seen as an independent video capture device

In this article, “Video Capture Devce” indicates a capture channel on the card, “Video Capture Card” indicates the whole card.

A video capture device has two kinds of representation methods

switch on the video capture card, Channel-ID represents the index of the device on the card. If the two video capture cards

have same dial switch num, the video capture device not the only one.

4.1 mwcap-info

mwcap-info is a commond line tool on Linux. It can get all Pro Capture series devices on the current PC and the infomation

about the hardware, input source, hdmi frames and file name of the device.

mwcap-info has the following commond line parameters:

NAME ANNOTATION
-h Show help message.
-l List all video capture devices.
-q This parameter represents video capture device,list the information of the specified device.
-i or --info-all This parameter represents video capture device, list all the attribute information of the specified device, include input source, hardware, and hdmi frames.
--info-device This parameter represents video capture device, list hardware information of the specified device.
--info-input-all This parameter represents video capture device, list input source information of the specified device.
--info-input-video This parameter represents video capture device, list video input source information of the specified device.
--info-input-audio This parameter represents video capture device, list audio input source information of the specified device.
--info-input-specific This parameter represents video capture device, lsit information related to interface of the specified device.
-v This parameter represents a device ID, list the v4l2 file name of the device, the option can be used in the script.
-a or --alsa-name This parameter represents video capture device, list the alsa file name of the device, the option can be used in the script.
--alsa-name-mplayer This parameter represents video capture device, list the alsa file name of the device which format is mplayer, the option can be used in the script.
--alsa-name-pa This parameter represents video capture device, list the Paulse Audio file name of the device, the option can be used in the script.
-c This parameter represents a device ID, list the num of the device which have the ID, the option can be used in the script.