VIP Frame Buffer Locks

Yeah, probing the guts of the VIP framebuffer is kind of a pain.

You could write your own frame buffer.

It just needs a memory mapped master read port,

mapped master write port,

streaming VIP in,

streaming VIP out,

and a simple state machine to control the read and write pointers as video comes into the block.

It should only take a couple of days to write and test if you are familiar with VIP and Avalon.

Then you wouldn't have to use the Altera one anymore.

I have written my own versions of a lot of blocks in the VIP family

because of the same problem that you are having now.

There is no good way to debug them when they don't work as advertised.

Also I have found that when I wrote my own VIP block, it used

substantially fewer resources compared to the Altera one.