News and New Products

Video card captures 480 frames/sec

By Warren Webb, Technical Editor -- EDN, 9/3/2008

Extending its line of OEM video-capture cards, Sensoray recently announced the model 817 PCIe (peripheral-component-interconnect-express) frame-grabber card, which captures 16 channels of compressed JPEG or uncompressed bit maps at speeds as high as 480 frames/sec. Supporting one, four, eight, or 16 PCIe slots, the board allows the user to set independent capture parameters for each channel. An internal 16×4 analog crosspoint-video switch routes any combination of four input channels to external video monitors. Users can turn each of the four video outputs on or off, allowing the outputs of multiple cards to drive one monitor.

The model 817 contains four identical VCPUs (video-capture and -processing units), each of which handles four input-video channels. Each VCPU employs a four-channel video decoder to convert analog video into digital and a DSP to capture digitized video and to handle various processing tasks, such as frame decimation, caption overlay, JPEG compression, and status reporting. Sensoray provides a software-development kit for the module that includes drivers and sample applications for Windows and Linux operating systems. The price for the model 817 starts at $705 (OEM quantities).