wlcx / hs450tool

A command line tool for sending/receiving images to/from the Panasonic AV-HS450 vision mixer's frame store.

Panasonic AV-HS450 Image Transmission Tool (open source edition)

This is a command line tool for sending/receiving images to/from the Panasonic AV-HS450 vision mixer's frame store, and a simpler open source replacement for Panasonic's own tool which is windows-only and tricky to find.

The mixer has 4 frame store slots. Each can hold a still image.

⚠️ Warning

I have tested this on my own hardware and it didn't screw anything up, but your milage may vary - use at your own risk!

Usage

hs450tool.py <ip of mixer> <get|put> <slot number> filepath When getting, the received image is saved to filepath. When putting, the image at filepath is sent.

The protocol

It's a binary, on TCP port 60010.

Getting images from the frame store

• Open the connection
• We send the one byte fetch command. The first nibble is slot number + 1, the second nibble is 1. So 0x21 for slot 1, 0x31 for slot 2, etc.
• Mixer sends back 0x10 (presumably some kind of acknowledgement)
• Mixer sends 4 bytes describing the dimensions of the image: 2 bytes for width, 2 for height. These are big-endian, so 0x07 0x80 0x04 0x38 is a width of 1920 and height of 1080.
• Mixer sends the image data. See image format.

Putting images in the frame store

• Open connection
• We send the one byte fetch command. The first nibble is slot number + 1, the second nibble is 4. So 0x24 for slot 1, 0x34 for slot 2, etc.
• Mixer sends 0xAC (presumably to acknowledge)
• We send 4 bytes describing the image dimensions - this is in the same format as above.
• We send the image data
• The mixer sends 0xAC when it's done storing the frame. This can be several seconds after we send the last image data - so make sure your socket doesn't timeout!

Image format

The mixer sends and receives image data encoded as YCbCr 4:2:2, also sometimes known as "YUY2". This means that a pair of sequential pixels is encoded as 4 bytes, $Y_1$ $C_B$ $Y_2$ $C_R$, where:

• $Y_1$ and $Y_2$ are the luma components of the first and second pixels in the pair, respectively
• $C_B$ and $C_R$ are the blue-difference and red-difference chroma components of both pixels. This is the same image format as HD-SDI, but 8 bit rather than 10 bit.