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Why xawtv warns me about some “overlay” support missing?

April 26, 2017MISSING overlay support warns xawtv

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Why xawtv warns me about some “overlay” support missing?

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Overlay is a hardware hack. Some PCI video capture cards can work in bus mastering mode. This allows them to hijack the main bus of the computer and access most of the memory as CPU itself normally does. This allows the video capture card to write directly into the video memory of the display card completely bypassing the CPU. Such hack is very efficient, and many popular PCI-based capture cards support it. However USB hardware is not capable of this feat. xawtv warns you that overlay support in USB camera driver is not available. True, it is not available because of hardware limitations.