How to reverse engineer a PCI-E video capture card?

Question

linux

There is one PCI-E video capture card. You need to reverse it in order to write a driver for Linux. What methods do you recommend? I do not want to climb into the driver under Windows. It would be nice to have something that allows you to capture the signal to the card. Something like WireShark does with a special driver for USB ports.

Answer 1

Well, darn it, a detailed understanding of the work of the existing software will allow you to rewrite it for a different platform. You can, in principle, look at the specification for the chip (if there is one) and try to write according to it, but this will have little to do with reversing.

Answer 2

In the absence of a hardware specification, a working driver for Windows is a good option.

Answer 3

Well, in general, reverse engineering of hardware and software are two different things. iron reversing is done to get the very circuit diagram for revision or for replication, but soft reversing is exactly what is needed in this case.
in the end, this card may have a processor that will spin some firmware and knowledge of the topology of the board will not give any useful information for writing a driver. and there probably is some element with complex logic, either a processor or plis, which is even cooler)

Answer 4

Updated the question.