We have a very interesting hardware vendor from Taiwan, which keeps on surprising. In past our software supported their PCI boards. They were quite popular for their price. Yes they were cheap and were based on a very popular video/audio capture chip which was probably too difficult to screw but they made their attempts. While the entire industry adopted DirectShow compatibility and video crossbar technology, these guys have been way smarter and just put an input stream number into video’s first pixel’s byte. If anything, software will sort frames out which is from which source!
With a wide range of hardware they supplied separate SDK for every model without any ability to detect which exactly piece of hardware is in… and yes all hardware and driver identifiers were mixed up between the models. Then they even went further and changed hardware leaving it the same model number. Did I mention lack of documentation? Did I mention drivers that don’t work?
It ended up with that time with cancellation of support for all models but just a few most popular we still had to support because its cheap and thus very much requested.
And we have another turn now: cheap stuff of a new generation Ethernet interfaced hardware. It is all about the same:
- model X shows itself as model Y
- lack of documentation
- separate SDK for each model, different naming conventions between models with similar functionality
- 3GPP compliance (which means RFC 2326 RTSP) declared but it is clear that it has a dumb customization in protocol which is mandatory and none of standard compliant software such as VLC is compatible
Still it’s cheap and in demand.