Matrox prepping new MXO2 drivers (v1.9)
9 February 2010 07:45
So whats the point of having a blog if you don’t ever blog anything, right? Normally I wouldn’t care, after all there are plenty of active bloggers out there with the inside scoop (or just an entertaining view) on all that goes on in our wonderful little padded cell world of post production, and you don’t need me adding my addled view of it every 5 minutes .... But then what to do when you’ve got a cat in a bag that needs letting out? I say let the bugger out before it pees all over the inside of your perfectly good bag. I mean, it was bad enough when the beans got spilled all over it ...
Anyway, enough with all the cats, beans and and beating around bushes malarky, lets get on to the Matrox MXO2 and, more importantly, the newest and imminent driver release that’s coming our way. Unlucky for some perhaps, but hopefully not for Matrox or their users, version 1.9 will be the 13th driver release for the MXO2 in just 18 months... and its a doozy.
Vetura is coming.
It’s an all new standalone player app, and one of my favourite features of the new release ... open, view and playback your captured files directly on your big screen through the Vetura player with no need to fire up FCP or the like.
Core Audio support is coming.
Sure to be a crowd pleaser, your MXO2 will now appear as a regular audio device at the OS level ... which means that you’ll be able to use it to listen to all your system and application audio, not just via supported video apps.
Active Format Description support is coming.
Say what? Ok, well AFD metadata describes the aspect ratio and picture characteristics of video signals. It’s used by broadcasters to dynamically control how down-conversion equipment formats widescreen 16:9 pictures for 4:3 displays.
... and 16 Channel Audio support is coming.
At present the MXO2 handles 8 channels of SDI embedded audio with Matrox’s closed captioning support using channel 8 to preserve SDI VANC closed captioning data (if required) ... this now expands to 16 channels of SDI embedded audio, with the SDI VANC AFD data optionally preserved on channel 15, and SDI VANC closed captioning data optionally preserved on channel 16. Cool.
And one more thing ... when you’re encoding using your Matrox MAX then you’re gonna love that the little red LED on the front of your MAX equipped unit now blinks to show you that its active. Just a little reassurance that it’s busy doing it’s thing. Nice eh?
As I noted once before, anything can be better if time and money are no object, and whilst both are in short supply these days for most users, its great to see that Matrox are still busily adding all new features, functionality and value to their MXO2 product line. Thanks guys, it really is very much appreciated.
So what’s the timeframe for actual release? Well thats kinda hard to say for sure, but the drivers seem pretty much “release candidate” stable so I’m hopeful it’ll be within a couple of weeks, sometime around Valentines Day maybe? Keep an eye on the Matrox support site and get your download finger ready :-).
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UPDATED 26/02/10:
The drivers have now been released : http://bit.ly/cH8z7g
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