576p SDI support

Hi,

I have a need to take in a 576p50 signal on SDI; it comes from HDMI, but I need to convert it to SDI for a variety of reasons (not the least because it's supposed to go into an SDI switching matrix). However, I can't find any support for 576p over SDI in any Blackmagic product; neither the HDMI-SDI converters nor the capture cards seem to list it, just 576i. It's supposed to be part of ED-SDI as I understand it; is there a good reason why not?

ED-SDI is part of SMPTE-344M, which even the mighty Teranex AV does not support. I don't think it ever got any real adoption.

Decimator seem to support it looking in their hardware manual for the MD-HX and MD-Cross.

Not sure I've ever seen it on BM products.

Decimator does support it.. But even the mini or micro converters back to HDMI don't handle it.. So were does that signal has to go as end point??

You'd somehow think supporting 576p wasn't much harder than supporting 720p, but perhaps there's something really odd about the mappings?

I guess a related question is what resolutions/modes does SDI support, period. The information is incredibly scattered and scarce; I don't understand why it is kept so much a secret.

EBU has a technical report on 3G-SDI that lists a bunch of them (see e.g. A1.2), but it only lists the ones that are new to 3G-SDI, not the older ones.

You'd somehow think supporting 576p wasn't much harder than supporting 720p, but perhaps there's something really odd about the mappings?

I guess a related question is what resolutions/modes does SDI support, period. The information is incredibly scattered and scarce; I don't understand why it is kept so much a secret.

EBU has a technical report on 3G-SDI that lists a bunch of them (see e.g. A1.2), but it only lists the ones that are new to 3G-SDI, not the older ones.

ED-SDI support is probably not any more difficult to add from a technical standpoint, but my guess is that BMD didn't feel the need to spend resources doing it as there's not much out there that uses it.

Supported formats over SDI are dictated by what SMPTE standards the equipment is compliant with. For most BMD products, there will be a list in the tech specs section. If you look up any specific standard, you will probably find a lot of writing on it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_di ... #Standards

Well, the standards documents are mostly secret… Ie., you have to pay to get to them.

And yes, BMD lists stuff like “we support 1080i59.94”, but there's still a lot of hidden details going on around e.g. sampling, RGB vs. Y'CbCr and so on. It would be nice to have a list of what exists and only then start narrowing onto what any given card can do.