Easy Installation
Installation of the hardware went flawlessly. The Osprey 500 DV Pro package consists of a PCI board and an external box with a cable connecting it to the PCI board (up to four boards can be installed in a single computer). No external power is required. Some of the inputs are located on the backplane of the PCI board, and the rest reside on the external box. I installed both the physical hardware and the Windows 2000 drivers in two different systems and encountered no problems. Uninstalling a driver and reinstalling a newer driver also proved trouble-free.
Feed Your WME WellThe philosophy behind the WME integration on this board is that pretty much everything except WME compression can be done without unnecessarily taxing PCI-bus bandwidth or CPU cycles. Because the Osprey 500 DV Pro has onboard DV25 decompression — unlike a generic IEEE 1394 port, which leaves decoding to software — feeding the WME with live data is just as speedy from a digital source as from an analog source. Either way, the Osprey board sends Uncompressed Windows Media Container content (previously known as ASF) out to the system and leaves the actual compression to WME. Since this raw format hasn't changed since it was first released in 1996, firmware updates won't be required in the foreseeable future.
Chew, Swallow and Digest
The Osprey 500 DV Pro provides many options for keeping the amount of uncompressed video data sent over the system bus to a minimum, and also for reducing WME CPU usage by preprocessing where appropriate. If you can stand the analogy, think of it this way: The Osprey 500 DV Pro can't digest a lobster dinner for WME, but it can take the meat out of the shell, dip it in butter, and chew it up before spoon-feeding it to WME, making it much easier for your system to process.
I'm standing by this analogy, so let's break it down. Taking the meat out of the shell: The Osprey 500 DV Pro can scale video so that it is reduced from the source size to just the size you need to broadcast. This can easily provide a 4x reduction in the amount of data fed to your computer's PCI bus. The board also provides cropping, so that a rectangle of your choosing can be treated as the full video source. You can scale video even after cropping it, so there's excellent flexibility here to keep the amount of data (or lobster meat) to a minimum.
Finally, the onboard color processing can be set to any one of seven color formats: RGB32, RGB24, RGB15, Grey8, YUY2, I420, and YVU9 planar. If those don't ring any bells, worry not, because all you need to know for now is that each color format represents the color data for each pixel differently. Some of these require more storage than others, so this selection can further reduce the number of bytes that get sent over the system bus and processed by the WME.Color formatting, however, is about much more than just resource management. There are a number of factors to consider in choosing the right color format for any given project, and the Osprey board can convert to any format you desire before feeding the data to WME. Consider this the seasoning, or dipping in butter, of your lobster.
OK, we're still not done with the lobster. Now it's time to chew the food, which is where the optional hardware de-interlacing comes in. In short, de-interlacing can provide a better-looking final image when dealing with full-resolution video with fast motion. WME does provide software de-interlacing. However, in my limited testing of CIF encoding at 30 frames per second, I found software de-interlacing to cause a CPU burden about 13 percent greater than when the Osprey board does the de-interlacing. Higher resolutions would impose a greater CPU burden.
page 1 2 3 next >>