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Blackmagic SDI and Bluetooth Camera Control Protocol
Version 1.4
If you are a software developer you can use the Blackmagic SDI and Bluetooth Camera Control
Protocol to construct devices that integrate with our products. Here at Blackmagic Design, our
approach is to open up our protocols and we eagerly look forward to seeing what you come up with!
Overview
This document describes an extensible protocol for sending a unidirectional stream of small control
messages embedded in the non-active picture region of a digital video stream. The video stream
containing the protocol stream may be broadcast to a number of devices. Device addressing is used
to allow the sender to specify which device each message is directed to.
Assumptions
Alignment and padding constraints are explicitly described in the protocol document. Bit fields are
packed from LSB first. Message groups, individual messages and command headers are defined as,
and can be assumed to be, 32 bit aligned.
Blanking Encoding
A message group is encoded into a SMPTE 291M packet with DID/SDID x51/x53 in the active region
of VANC line 16.
Message Grouping
Up to 32 messages may be concatenated and transmitted in one blanking packet up to a maximum
of 255 bytes payload. Under most circumstances, this should allow all messages to be sent with a
maximum of one frame latency.
If the transmitting device queues more bytes of message packets than can be sent in a single frame,
it should use heuristics to determine which packets to prioritize and send immediately. Lower priority
messages can be delayed to later frames, or dropped entirely as appropriate.
Abstract Message Packet Format
Every message packet consists of a three byte header followed by an optional variable length data
block. The maximum packet size is 64 bytes.
Destination device (uint8)
Device addresses are represented as an 8 bit unsigned integer.
Individual devices are numbered 0 through 254 with the value
255reserved to indicate a broadcast message to all devices.
Command length (uint8)
The command length is an 8 bit unsigned integer which specifies the
length of the included command data. The length does NOT include
the length of the header or any trailing padding bytes.
Command id (uint8)
The command id is an 8 bit unsigned integer which indicates
themessage type being sent. Receiving devices should ignore any
commands that they do not understand. Commands 0 through 127
are reserved for commands that apply to multiple types of devices.
Commands 128 through 255 are device specific.
Reserved (uint8)
This byte is reserved for alignment and expansion purposes. It should
be set tozero.
Command data (uint8[])
The command data may contain between 0 and 60 bytes of data.
The format of the data section is defined by the command itself.
2143Developer Information
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