Plans for N6 support H264 Encoder

OpenMV Boards
1

Hi OpenMV team,

I would like to ask for the plan for H.264 Codec support. Currently I cannot find anything in documentation and source code. Is this in the plan for N6? Also, I’m interested in the support for WiFi and BLE.

Thank you for your time!

Leonard

2

Hi, bluetooth and wifi are both operational on the N6. Ethernet is about to be merged. So, all PC like coms will be online shortly.

As for the H.264, we have not started work on integrating that, but, as it’s purely hardware inside the CPU we are pushing this until December to start work on it. The most immediant thing is to work on getting a firmware release out, IDE release, documentation release, and then update to a new serial prototcol which will allow for using H.264 easily, then release again. After which we can focus on getting H.264 done.

Most of the code for this is in a library so the C/Python wrapper code we write is likely to get done quickly.

3

Thanks for your reply! Also I wonder how could I tune the clock frequency for N6. I’m not familiar with the clock configuration of N6 and would be appreciate if you can provide me some hints to edit the cpu_freq function.

4

Hi, we cannot provide help for that. You just need to get the reference manual for the chip and ST Cube and work out the details. It’s not particularly hard to figure everything out, but, tedious.

5

Hi. Just received my new N6 earlier today. Thanks! I was wondering if you have a timescale for the h264 encoder (or if I have missed it). Will we be able to overlay text and graphics and feed those frames into the h264 and then stream to rtsp or similar?

6

Hi, we haven’t implemented it yet. But, it and the fastest possible JPEG compression support (also supported via the VENC onboard) are on the top of my todo. I think we can land it sometime in May. I should have working PR firmware in April though.

As for text and graphics, yes, it will work like how the MJPEG objects works, but, better designed so you can get generic byte streams from it for sending via RTSP or writing to disk.

7

Great! Thanks for the update.