Re: Easiest way to do VGA to Text
Martin McCormick wrote:
> I've been trying to do the impossible, more like the
> impractical, for some time now so I need a knowledge infusion.
>
> I want to be able to read the VGA output of a computer,
> do OCR on it and have ASCII text.
>
> As a computer user who happens to be blind, one of the
> most frustrating issues is the fact that except for expensive
> servers, none of these boxes output any machine readable text
> when booting up or in setup mode such as when the coin cell that
> powers the CMOS BIOS gives up the ghost and one needs to do a
> setup on it, etc.
The parts that you will need:
- a video capture device. I don't know about VGA input, but I do
know that HDMI video capture devices can be had for prices
ranging from $25 to $250 or so.
- transformation from video to still images can be done via the
package imagemagick
- OCR can be done with the package tesseract-ocr
In future, if you can arrange to buy used server hardware
instead of desktop-class machines, you'll have access to various
IPMI (DRAC, ILO) serial console systems which include BIOS
access.
-dsr-
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