Description

Model 1012 is a Mini PCIe board that simultaneously captures up to eight NTSC/PAL composite video and eight mono analog audio signals. Each of its eight identical channels captures uncompressed video at full frame rate and uncompressed audio at up to 48 kHz.

Simplified 1012 block diagram

All operating power is supplied by the Mini PCIe bus, and the board's single-lane (x1) interface allows it to be plugged into any Mini PCIe slot. The 1012's tiny footprint and high performance make it ideally suited for surveillance and other applications in which multiple video and audio signals must be captured at the same time.

Video

The eight video inputs can accept up to eight NTSC or PAL signals (all signals must be same type). Each channel captures uncompressed video at full frame rate (30 fps NTSC, 25 fps PAL), resulting in an aggregate capture rate of up to 240 fps (NTSC) or 200 fps (PAL), at up to D1 resolution.

The image resizer supports a variety of common resolutions, and images can be flipped horizontally, vertically or both. Captured frames may be formatted as YUYV, UYVY, RGB555, or RGB565.

Audio

Each line-level audio input is captured in PCM format, at a sampling rate of 8, 16, 42, 44.1 or 48 kHz.

Connectors

Two 16-pin headers are used to connect the audio and video inputs to external circuitry. Each header provides access to all audio inputs and four of the eight video inputs.

Software

Software Development Kits (SDK) are available for Linux and Windows. The SDKs include drivers, programming samples, and comprehensive documentation to enable programmers to quickly develop custom applications.

Performance

Due to the extremely high data rates involved, a computer with sufficient bandwidth and processing power is required to ensure error-free processing of the video streams produced by Model 1012.

Sensoray bundles chipset drivers for both Linux and Windows. The Linux driver is high performance and makes possible simultaneous full frame rate capture at D1 resolution from all eight inputs. The Windows driver has lower performance that may impose tradeoffs between the number of active channels and resolution.

The following table shows combinations of channels and resolutions that will reliably result in error-free processing on a typical modern, high performance PC. In general, higher channel counts and resolutions require a higher performance computer. See Performance Benchmarks for examples of the actual performance observed on various computers.

Maximum channels vs. resolution

In the case of PCs with an Intel chipset, a plug-in graphic video card may be required to obtain satisfactory performance when previewing multiple channels.