Pinnacle Studio 700

Introduction

Of the current (Feb 2007) generation of products from Pinnacle Systems (now a division of Avid,) this device is more commonly known as the Studio MovieBoard Plus as well as the Studio MovieBox Plus. The difference is that the 'Board is a PCI card with breakout box while the 'Box is an external USB device. They are otherwise identical in functionality.

This article will focus on the Studio Plus 700 PCI (p/n BIGBEN-51014278-1.0) because that's what this author owns, but most information should apply to others in the family (Studio 500.)

The included BlueBox breakout box connects to the PCI card with a proprietary 26-pin D-sub connector and it contains two sets of the following connectors, one each for input and output: S-video (4-pin mini-DIN), composite video (RCA), Left audio (RCA), Right audio (RCA).

The PCI card itself features the following ports: 26-pin Breakout Box port, 1/8" (2.5mm) stereo Audio Out phone plug, and two 6-pin IEEE-1394 ("Firewire") ports.

Technical Details

It also contains the following IC chips:

Pinnacle 51011810 / MB87J3560        Main video processor (reported to be a Conexant chip by Pinnacle tech support, but they did not know which.)
NXP/Phillips SAA7113H                         9-bit video input processor
Analog Devices ADV7179                     NTSC/PAL Video Encoder
IDT/SigmaTel STAC9750T                     2-channel AC'97 audio CODEC

The SAA7113H is reported to be supported by the saa7115.ko Linux driver which comes with recent (2.6) kernels.

The lspci -vvnnn output is:

       61:04.0 Multimedia controller [0480]: Pinnacle Systems Inc. AV/DV Studio Capture Card [11bd:bede]
               Subsystem: Pinnacle Systems Inc. Unknown device [11bd:0023]
               Control: I/O- Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR+ FastB2B-
               Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=medium >TAbort- <TAbort+ <MAbort+ >SERR- <PERR-
               Latency: 66 (2000ns min, 4000ns max), Cache Line Size: 64 bytes
               Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 5
               Region 0: Memory at fa600000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4K]
               Capabilities: [40] Power Management version 2
                       Flags: PMEClk- DSI+ D1- D2- AuxCurrent=0mA PME(D0-,D1-,D2-,D3hot-,D3cold-)
                       Status: D0 PME-Enable- DSel=0 DScale=0 PME-

       61:04.1 FireWire (IEEE 1394) [0c00]: Pinnacle Systems Inc. Unknown device [11bd:0015] (prog-if 10 [OHCI])
               Subsystem: Pinnacle Systems Inc. Unknown device [11bd:0023]
               Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR+ FastB2B-
               Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=medium >TAbort- <TAbort- <MAbort- >SERR- <PERR-
               Latency: 64 (8000ns min, 20000ns max), Cache Line Size: 64 bytes
               Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 5
               Region 0: Memory at fa601000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=2K]
               Capabilities: [44] Power Management version 2
                       Flags: PMEClk- DSI- D1+ D2+ AuxCurrent=0mA PME(D0-,D1+,D2+,D3hot+,D3cold-)
                       Status: D0 PME-Enable- DSel=0 DScale=0 PME-

Current status

This author has attempted to load all Conexant (cx*), BTTV (card=52), SAA*, IVTV and em28xx modules provided with the Linux 2.6.18 kernel but no /dev/video* devices appear after restarting udev. The test machine is an HP xw9300 Workstation running Debian Etch amd64.

In order for this card to work on Linux, a Pinnacle AV/DV2 Linux driver is needed to be written. (Or some way to use the Windows driver needs to be devised.)