Blackmagic Forum

I have a Intensity shuttle USB3.0, I want to use it with a Linux PC, Is anyone already using it with Linux?

Thanks

Our USB 3.0 devices currently only have driver support on the Windows platform, so unfortunately there isn't a Linux driver available for the Intensity Shuttle USB 3.0. We're happy to take the possibility of Linux driver support into consideration, but we currently don't support it.

Same request here. I am also a kernel engineering in a well-known Linux company, so I'd be glad to contribute in some way if needed.

I though tha I was the only one asking for Intensity Shuttle USB 3.0 drivers for Linux, I'm migrating my streaming laptop to ubuntu and gain more stability.

same here as well!
we're already using your SDI cards for television playout with the great MLT framework on Linux, as well as the Intensity Pro cards for Streaming from remote Locations. I'd really love to see Shuttle USB 3.0 support as well!
You build really great hardware! let us use your hardware with a stable and mature Operating system

another request!

Please do consider Linux driver support for the Intensity Shuttle. I have an Intensity Shuttle USB 3.0 (as well as other Blackmagic devices, they are awesome!). I've yet to get the Shuttle working, including under Windows 7, as none of my computers have the proper USB 3.0 chipset (x58/P55?). Linux support seems inevitable for good hardware... please, sooner than later

Some quick google'ing to represent others here who desire this as well, going back to 2010:
http://forums.creativecow.net/thread/124/875054
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1588302
http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=48&t=68059
http://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=94574

There's a post on a Linux USB development list that says: isochronous transfer support with
USB3 in Linux is it at a stage that Blackmagic (or someone) could start to port their pcie-driver to work over usb3.
http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.usb.general/52482

Thanks!

xen wrote:... Linux support seems inevitable for good hardware... please, sooner than later

In this case it's not really relevant as the issue is typically with either the USB3 driver or it's location on the motherboard not allowing it enough bandwidth.

But the request is not unheard!

Joshua Helling wrote:But the request is not unheard!

good to hear that!
is there any time frame you can tell us? i am just about to buy a laptop for a live streaming setup and just wonder if i can skip buying the windows 7 licence

also if you'd like more feedback on the state of your driver i'd be more than willing to participate in some beta tests

dorftv wrote:...is there any time frame you can tell us?...

Well, I'm not sure we've decided to even do it. Though we obviously like to maintain consistency of platform support. So couldn't give you any sort of timeframe. Just wanted to assure you that we do hear what you are asking for.

Thanks for hearing.

As I am understanding, this product is very particular about the host computer's USB 3 offering (driver, chipset, and location on motherboard) due to the large amount of bandwidth required to transmit the data.

It seems to me, that the number of USB3-enabled computers that can successfully use this product is rather slim. I originally researched compatibility of one of my desktop motherboards before purchasing and then discovered that the later revision of the motherboard that I have changed the USB3 chipset - I think that's why the Intensity Shuttle does not work with that motherboard. So, I'm wondering what to do with it... I ended up with an Intensity Pro pci-e in that desktop (works great!) and I still have a Shuttle I can't currently use and I'm still in desire of a portable USB3 video input device (preferably that works under Linux, supports some higher defs, and is made by Blackmagic Design).

What if a driver for the Intensity Shuttle USB3 tested the available bandwidth then offered some level of function based on that? Maybe the host the Shuttle is connected to can't support full HD, but maybe it could support less FPS and/or smaller resolutions and at least the lower-def Composite AV and S-Video input/outputs. Is this a viable option? Maybe it works similar to the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test utility that shows what you can and can't do (with stability) rather than having all or nothing.

As more computers ship with USB3 and as USB3 evolves past "new" and into "standard", do you forsee more compatibility with the Intensity Shuttle? Should we be looking instead at Thunderbolt?

Thanks.

Well, moving forward I think compatibility will be better.

Currently we weren't having much luck with USB3 integrated onto the motherboard (very few motherboards did it right, and the X58 reference design was one of the only ones).

The upshot there was you could always get a PCI-e card, and several (though not all) of those worked well. Still as we found those cards, they'd get superseded by ones that didn't work as well or were discontinued in general.

Also we've got a few motherboards in house from Gigabyte running the ivy-bridge chipset and they seem to work well for USB3 (even the onboard controller). The Gigabyte Z77X-UP4-TH we've tested and works great with all of our USB3 products. There's a weird caveat. It has 3 Long PCI-express slots, but only two work if you dont' specifically have an IVY bridge processor. But with just the two it also works fine. We have a couple other boards we are working on testing now but are in the same family and we imagine those will work too.

I too would like to use my Intensity Shuttle with my Ubuntu pc and laptop. The ideas of Xen are VERY useful for users, if implemented. A combination with DNxHD and Prores like the Hyperdeck would be great.

But if you find a usable USB 3 pci-e card that is discontinued, couldn't you order a few thousand from the factory, or however much you need, and sell them on as yours?

Desktop Video 9.6 is said to be usable on Linux. But apparently not with Intensity shuttle USB3.0.

That's a pity.

Hello,

I also would like to see a Linux version of the Intensity Shuttle driver.
I just want to get rid of Windows in some cases.
I'm currently using an ASUS P8P67 Deluxe (Rev. B3) and my Intensity Shuttle works perfect with the onboard Rensas Electronics USB 3.0 Controller.

I have also been asking for Linux support for a while, I'm glad to hear that our requests are at least being considered. Honestly, my capture card is the only thing keeping me tied to Windows at this point.

On an unrelated note, my laptop (HP DV6-6135DX) supports the Shuttle USB 3.0 just fine using the AMD USB 3.0 controller (which is pretty much a rebranded Renesas controller). Keep that in mind when looking at compatibility in the future.

Do we have an update on Linux support?

Also we join on this request, it would be wonderful if I.S. usb3 would work on linux.

For us linux support is quite important consideration when making the decision (right after latency/speed, and before the price), e.g. if there exists as good product as I.S.usb3 but with linux support (especially if it works open source) we would rather buy it even if +50% more expensive.

Joshua Helling wrote:The Gigabyte Z77X-UP4-TH we've tested and works great with all of our USB3 products. There's a weird caveat. It has 3 Long PCI-express slots, but only two work if you dont' specifically have an IVY bridge processor.

That reminds me of the time with 3 pci-e slots for GFX card, the cards worked only when is slot #1+#3 not in #1+#2, and if the cards where 5970 radeons then only if you tweaked some seemingly unrelated settings in BIOS.

PC hardware could use much more standardization.

+1 for the request. Intensity shuttle and ideally H.264 Pro Encoder drivers for linux would be greatly appreciated.

more one +1

+1 H.264 Pro Recorder/Encoder drivers for linux would be awesome.

No more news about this topic yet?

We decided to resign from this product for now since our target platforms will be Linux (debian and gentoo).

However still we need internal cards for full PC, so the Intensity Pro looks like best solution and it officially support Linux

I was about to order an intensity pro for testing purposes (will need a bunch if we can use it), and then I discovered that my PC only has one PCIe slot, which is already taken by the graphics card. So let me add yet another request for Linux support. The current situation is costing sales.

Ouch. I just got an Intensity Shuttle, and suddenly (now) found out that there's no Linux driver. So much for doing research...

Thing is that I already had Intensity Pro, that only works when it's alone in the computer, so I wanted another video source and saw that I had USB 3.0, so tried that... But it's rather useless now. :/

+1 for a linux driver. Can't wait to get mine:) Can I sign up to be notified?

+1 for Linux driver.

++1

+4

+1

+1 so badly ...

+2

Another request for Linux driver.

I am getting a lot of BSOD using Intensity Shuttle USB + Adobe FMLE on Windows 7.
My goal is to use Intensity Shuttle USB + FFMPEG on Linux.

Just wanted to give you guys an update. The devs are aware of this and are working on getting those out to you. As far as an ETA, I don't have one right now but we will let you know when we have an update.

Thats great to hear, thx for enabling the USB3 devices!!

Any plans to enable it on thunderbolt as well? Lot of Motherboards have thunderbolt also now available.... ???

thx
rainer

Dear Blackmagic Devs,
Please expedite linux support as my company has a crap ton of Linux mini servers which do video encoding and they are all begging for an HD upgrade. If the Intensity Shuttle Thunderbolt had Linux support, we'd buy a great big pile of them and upgrade tomorrow.

For info: We use Mac Minis running Linux. We have tested the shuttle in OSX with thunderbolt and love it, BUT.... we aren't willing to have OSX machines in production use. Our experience tells us that OSX is just too evil to comprehend when used at scale. So why minis? Our use case needs the compact size and relative low cost. We run Linux on them so that we can efficiently manage an infinite number of the beasts. (We tried to achieve massive scale OSX management and it was a horrible failure. Go try to run an OSX management master in ESX VMware - your head will explode. And even if you do put a physical Mac in the rack as the master, there are so many non-standard evil tricks involved to get anything working, it's crazy. Forget scaling out to a dozen facilities if you can't get one working efficiently.)

Therefore we're seeking ways to get up to HD in a smart and affordable way at large scale, and the new Shuttles seem to be a key part. Regarding hardware encoders: We know them all but our automation needs exclude them all, which is why we have our own custom ffmpeg wrapper in Linux. Most of our new-ish minis are powerful enough to do HD; our tests in OSX with the new Intensity Shuttle work pretty nicely. But we aren't willing to have production machines running OSX due to how horrible they are to manage at enterprise volumes. Windows of course has enterprise management solved, but we can't afford to reboot the machines every day.

To conclude: Even if Blackmagic only supported USB3 in linux, we'd probably be willing to dump the mountains of Minis on the used hardware market and find non-apple USB 3 capable replacements with a similar form factor.

God bless Linux, please support it!

+1 for Linux support.

And a V4L2 kernel driver for the really neat USB VideoRecorder product as well.

While you're at it

+1 for Linux support.

I am using linux and i would say that it was really amazing.

Does anyone know if Linux (Debian) is supported for the BMD H.264 Pro Recorder ? In other words is the h.264 output stream available on Linux (so it can be streamed) ?

Tony Rivera wrote:Just wanted to give you guys an update. The devs are aware of this and are working on getting those out to you. As far as an ETA, I don't have one right now but we will let you know when we have an update.

Can anyone tell me if the development of Linux drivers for the shuttle has started yet, or what the status is? I'm developing a solution for a customer, of which this product would fit in nicely if it had Linux drivers. Essentially he'd include these with the boxes he currently distributes, which would mean probably few hundred purchases just from us alone. The orders are already in, so if you have no plan to make the drivers; I'll have to find another solution, or end up building something myself. If you have something started, but just not finished yet, and feel like sharing, I may be able to contribute or help.

I'm sorry to say I don't have a current update to this as of yet.

So does that mean (a) development has been approved but not started, (b) development has not been approved and not started, (c) development has been approved and started, but we are no where near knowing when a release will be available, or something like (d) we talked about this a few months ago, but it hasn't been mentioned since?

Ideally we'd like to have a Linux driver as this would be the fastest method to finish our solution, but ultimately just knowing where you are at will at least help our business make a more educated decision.

Thank you.

I am not part of the development team so I'm not the best person to answer those questions quite honestly. The last I had heard is when I posted that previous statement about the team being aware of the requests.

Hi Toni,

It's great that the development department is aware of our request for a Linux usb driver, but perhaps someone such as one of your senior developers or his manager can give us a more in depth status update, is there a technical problem or a matter of resources being prioritized into other areas? In case the later, have you considered lending some hardware + specs to some hardware developers in the open source community? Perhaps some of them are even your customers..?

Plz, no more empty answers of you being aware of the issue, we are interested in a solution, not excuses so feel free to think out of the box..


- Nicolas

i totally agree to what nicolas wrote!

+1 for linux driver

We would really appreciate if Linux would appreciate if you would add Linux support. We bought this product with intend to use it on Linux notebook, to only find out that driver which you can download support only PCIe cards.

Any News on the USB3.0 driver for Linux? We would really need that one !!!

Any updates? We'd like to organize low-cost mobile streaming station and linux driver would be great for it.

using it for example with intel nuc boards would be awesome...
please tell us it is definitely coming...
waiting hard for usb3 support on linux!

It has been 18 months already since the first post.

Did your dev team already begin to work on linux driver?
Or is your dev team still just "aware of the requests"?

Do you have beta version of driver for this card?
I am using Ubuntu 14.04 beta OS. This card doesn't work for any Ubuntu Linux.
I download package from Support Center but the driver is not for this card (see readme file).

Count me too, we would love a Linux driver! We would buy 50 more shuttles tomorrow if it existed.