Copyright: Copyright (C) 2004-2022 AJA Video Systems, Inc. All rights reserved.

The NTV2 Software Development Kit (SDK) is a suite of classes and data types which allow end-users to access and control nearly any NTV2-compatible AJA device using the C++ programming language.

Contents

Introduction

AJA hardware products play back or ingest video/audio, plus ancillary data (e.g., timecode, captions, etc.) to or from a host computer. The purpose of the SDK is to enable third-party developers to easily access and/or control the video, audio or ancillary data entering or leaving the device. The SDK has two major parts – a low-level device driver, and a user-space library.

The device driver runs at the kernel level and handles low-level communication with the device. It is a required component of the SDK and provides the user-space library with the means to communicate and control the device.

The “libajantv2” Class Library (libajantv2.lib on Windows, or libajantv2.a on Linux and MacOS) is the principal user-space library that an application must link with in order to access and control AJA devices. It implements a suite of C++ classes which an application can instantiate and use to perform various operations on an AJA device. This library contains many functions that are useful for interrogating and controlling AJA devices.

Most NTV2 object class instances can be created in the usual ways – using operator new, creating it directly on the stack, or by aggregation (incorporating the NTV2 object as a member variable in your own class). For destruction, the usual rules apply. NTV2 objects that were created on the stack will automatically destruct when they go out of scope. Instances that were created via aggregation will destruct when the owning object’s destructor is called. Instances that were explicitly created using operator new must be explicitly destroyed using operator delete.

As a general rule, AJA recommends never deriving your application’s classes from any NTV2 classes.