Matrox X.mio3 Overview

The X.mio3 can be ordered in two configurations: FH (full height, 12 physical HD-BNC connectors, plus one connector for sync) and LP (low profile, eight physical HD-BNC Connectors, plus one connector for sync). Both are half length PCI express Gen2 x8 cards.

• X.mio3FH (Full Height, half length) with up to 12 I/O ports, SD to 4K capable. This card can be ordered with six, eight or X2 (12) I/O. Eight ports are hardwired through relays: Four inputs to four outputs. Model /6 means six I/Os are available, model /8 eight I/Os. Model X2 (twelve ports) has four freely configurable ports. There can be maximum eight I/Os of one type (either in or out) enabled on a card.

• X.mio3LP (Low Profile, half length) with up to eight I/O ports, SD to 4K capable.

• The I/O ports are configurable. This means that for instance the X.mio3 model /8 can be configured to have from 8/0 (e.g. 8 channels in, zero channels out) to 0/8 (zero channels in, eight channels out) or any mix between such 1/7, 4/4 and so on.

• One connector is reserved for a reference signal (sync) marked as REF.
  The default card is an X.mio3/6/100, meaning X.mio3 FH with six connectors class 100. The class 100 can not play any video clips and upgrade to class 500 is required to enable both SD and HD clip playback. For Apple ProRes support, the class 550 is needed.

The I/O connectors for the X.mio3 are of the Mini-BNC (also called HD-BNC) type. The use of cable converters from Mini-BNC to BNC may be required.

The X.mio3 cards can be combined with the AES Audio Kit for 16 AES audio channels In/Out, see X.mio3 AES Audio Kit.

X.mio3 FH

X.mio3 FH provides multichannel SDI IO with hardware based video processing in a full-height, half-length PCI express card with 13 physical HD-BNC connectors. This card provides up to 12 reconfigurable I/Os, from SD to 4K, one connector is reserved for sync. Support for AES/EBU, LTC and GPIO provide for versatile connectivity. The multi-channel hardware processing accelerates compute-intensive operations including motion-adaptive de-interlacing, up/down/cross scaling and mixing/compositing for all resolutions, including 4K.

Key features:

• Half-length PCI express card

• Re-configurable IO that can support up to 12 SDI IO

• Frame synchronizers

• VANC and HANC support for each input and output

• Analog black burst reference input (tri-level or bi-level)

• On-board multi-channel MADI (Motion Adaptive De-Interlacer)

• On-board multi-channel Up/Down/Cross scaler

• On-board multilayer compositor

• Automatic video relay bypass

• Live zero-frame delay video and audio mixers

• Up to 16 channels of AES/EBU inputs and outputs

• Up to eight LTC inputs and outputs

• RS422 control

• Single slot all inclusive option

  IMPORTANT! Not all X.mio3 hardware features are supported by Viz Engine. Features available depends on drivers, SDK and Engine versions in use.

X.mio3 LP

Matrox X.mio3 LP is a low-profile, half-length PCIe card with up to eight reconfigurable SDI I/Os from SD to 4K.

X.mio3 I/O Port Configuration

Normally the I/O ports are pre-configured when delivered from Vizrt. If the I/O configuration needs to be changed, the Matrox command-line utility mvConnectorConfig.exe normally found in

must be used. mvConnectorConfig.exe can be called from the command prompt without options to get a helpful usage message. To configure all X.mio3 cards in a system to use four inputs and two outputs the syntax is:

To configure six outputs and no inputs the syntax is:

and so on for the various I/O possibilities.

The computer should be stable with low load and no Viz programs running when using the configuration utility. Never interrupt a firmware upgrade. After making changes to the Matrox I/O configuration, the computer must be re-started with a complete power off.

Viz Engine Matrox Video Mapping Configuration

Open VizConfiguration > Matrox to configure the Matrox video channel mapping and mapping type.

The Viz video inputs are named alphabetically and limited to the number of available I/O channels the system has. The number in parenthesis indicates which channel is being used for fill and key.If you do not need a key signal in the output, de-select the Key > Contains Alpha option to make the I/O channel available for other usages. Example configuration:

In the example above, the X.mio3 card is configured with 6 outputs (named VideoOut A to F) and no inputs. The numbers within the trailing parentheses reflect which IO-channel is being used for fill and key, respectively. This means VideoOut A uses IO-channel 2 for fill and IO 6 for key, VideoOut B uses IO 4 for fill, IO 8 for key, while VideoOut C only has fill using IO 6, and so on.

Navigate to Config > Matrox > General for an overview showing which I/O channels are used for fill and key, as illustrated in the Board Info section of the screenshot below:

To Upgrade X.mio3 Class and Firmware

To upgrade your X.mio3 card, for example to enable more IO-ports or a codec upgrade for HD-Clipback, you must use the mvDongleUpdater.exe update utility with your Vizrt supplied license upgrade file <filename>.OPT. This utility is installed with the Matrox driver package and is normally installed to:

To upgrade the card use this syntax:

The command above must be run from a Windows command line window (Windows-button > cmd > Enter).

The Matrox X.info utility is used to display information about the card class, how the Input and Outputs are configured, serial number and more. This utility can normally be started from the Windows taskbar. A typical information window would be:

X.mio3 AES Audio Kit

The X.mio3 AES Audio Kit connects to the X.mio3 card internally and takes up one slot as indicated in the picture below:

The kit contains:

• Two internal cables with bracket.

• Two external cables, each cable has:

  • Eight AES/EBU in and eight AES/EBU out (total 16 AES/EBU in and out).

  • Four LTC in and four LTC out (total eight LTC in and out).