At 01:58 PM 6/20/2005 +0800, Peter DeSantis wrote: >Didnt know there was a 4 channel osprey, gonna check that one out myself
I have an Osprey 440 - its one of the first 20 pre production units and is loaded with beta drivers. Previously we have used 4x Osprey 100 and lately Spectra-8 cards for video capture in AG nodes running under windows. The Spectra 8 is a nice card, but does have an annoying habit of asking which port goes where every time you go into a venue. The Osprey 440 is a PCI card with 8 audio and 4 video inputs, all with independent capture chips. The card has 4x BNC connectors and 8x RCA connectors (via a fan out connector). On the board there are binder posts for a further 3 video inputs per capture chip and I think a similar number of audio inputs. Certainly S-video and balanced audio is available on these posts. The card installed really well and after a reboot, the inputs show up as video1A video1B video1C video1D I suspect the newer drivers will allow greater control and selection of inputs. The drivers certainly had many features that are very useful like logo insertion, proc amp controls, etc. There are separate controls for both the captured video and the displayed video. Simulstream was available for each input. I guess this would allow simultaneous encoding with 6 different parameter sets, including choice of input. This could be awesome at a large event where several or many different stream products are being delivered from several video sources, mixes or feeds. Currently I use racks of PCs all with Simulstream. Mulitple CPUs gets around the big shortage - CPU capacity as well as providing lots of reliability, but simulstream is great for providing a really easy way of doing a multi-bit rate webcast. My first test was to run it under MS encoder. I ran 4 instances of encoder and it performed well. Of course the capture was very quickly constrained by CPU capacity. I was running under a 2.8GHz Celeron in an Iwill chasis, with the idea of making a small but very capable capture machine. I did notice that under MS encoder, I got errors from ks.sys when accessing the sound mixer for each stereo input pair. However, the mixer did still work, so I suspect it is a beta driver error. As it was late, I didn't run a long encoding session to see how stable it was. That is underway right now. My next test was to run it as an Access Grid node. Sadly this wasn't so great. The first input loaded as a "video Producer" like a dream. The second one produced errors "C++ error" and complained that you can't access the same device twice. Third and fourth VideoProducer loads did the same thing. However, at least two of them then worked !! Of course the next time I tried it - only one input worked and only one has worked since then. RAT didn't see any of the sound inputs, so the motherboard card was used. I did try and get the VfW drivers loaded and going, but started to descend into windows driver hell. I backed out of that mission. So in summary - its a great card with great promise. For encoding with plenty of CPU it will be terrific. As an Access Grid node, right now it needs a little work done on the WDM drivers. I suspect the final release drivers will be great........I'll just have to wait. Rich
