CompuServe Messages

Paul, Actually your question I decided was not silly at all. Having reflected on it at some length, it occurred to me that what might seem obvious to me may not at all be apparent to others. And when I got back I intended to outline what scenario I envisioned as being possible, but which is apparently not. As far as tricking goes… that is apparently a matter of interpretation. <G> I wrote Peter Richards a rather long explanation as I recieved his post first… but the long and the short of it appears to be that there is no "hook" for video directly. Therefore framebuffers as we know them are obsolete. What appears to be happening emerging on the hardware side, is some clever tactics to get around this apparent short coming. The PVR never dealt with this issue because you could never access its framebuffer to begin with. So writing drivers was a matter of writing drivers to control it, and that is all. We still talking about a two monitor arrangement because for the output side you need a second monitor. But its not like in the DOS days when you had an VGA card running text and framebuffer doing the grabbing working directly with the OS. As far as the D/Vision thing goes, it remains to be seen, but I suspect, that the Ill Pro in that configuration as well will be as an independent device supported through the D/Vision interface directly as part of a two monitor arrangement where the Ill Pro will essentially have no relation to NT whatsoever… therefore no NT driver required. I've seen many many technical and scientific frame "grabbers" as they are called, which are clever work arounds. The way they work is, they grab the video usually YUV and pump it into the RGB output of the display device and write out a file very similar to if you did a screen capture in SVGA. These scientific solutions by the way do not require a visible interface and require the device to programmed by the user. They do provide NT drivers just as any of the other display cards that support NT do as that is what they are essentially, display devices. (albiet with a clever way or converting a stream of video into yuv and then RGB into a file which NT will accept.) That is the extent of video support in NT. To quote Laurie McIntosh, I'd be a happy girl if it were otherwise. <G> John PS the direct approach always works best with me, too much room for interpretation of motive otherwise… <G>