First of all, I would like to personally thank you for this project. Amazing and thorough project, the community is great, and the work you have done to help strangers is incredible.
I am using an Xiris camera that is meant to record the welding process, and they advertised GigE vision, but after purchasing they claim it’s only available if you buy their SDK. In the Clippy spirit I want to find a way around this and make getting video out of a camera not require windows. I looked with wireshark and their app actually already uses GigE vision, and Aravis viewer detects it fine.
However I noticed that the device is actually listed as Pleora and realized that they didn’t even make the hardware, they’re using an FPGA from Pleora to get GigE vision.
When actually viewing the stream, it just displays rolling black bars that look like the frames aren’t aligned. I tried using the resolution listed by the manufacturer and both 12bit mono color options to try to match that of the original app. (It doesn’t actually expose that info, just says 12-bit, and I don’t know if I can trust that) But it still produces video that looks obviously wrong.
I also noticed the test camera does the same thing, what is the feed from the test camera supposed to look like, so I can rule out video playback on my machine. I doubt it, for the reason I’ll mention next, but it would be a coincidence if my camera and the fake local implementation both generate the same garbage data.
Looking at wireshark while running, and the camera really is just counting in binary for the stream packets. Judging by the way they’ve treated my so far, I wouldn’t rule out deliberate DRM, but we paid close to 5 figures for a camera that said they supported this feature, and tried to make us buy Pleora’s rebranded SDK to get it.
Luckily we do have a windows machine that IS getting video with their app (just uses GigE vision under the hood) and wireshark dumps to go with it.
I know nothing about this protocol, but I want to figure this out and hopefully contribute fixes back, let me know what I can do to make this process easier for you, and if there’s something I can do to get more info.