Slick Capture

To test capture, I performed a full-screen, 640-by-480 capture at 30 frames per second. Using WME, things went smoothly, with CPU usage ranging between 65 percent and 70 percent on our 933MHz Pentium III test machine, with a SCSI hard drive. This is extremely good, especially considering that I didn't use any of the Osprey's on-board processing (MPEG compression, cropping, scaling, color format transformation, de-interlace, or inverse telecine).

However, testing capture at the same resolution and frame rate, Osprey's own capture utility, VidCap32, locked into a quasi-permanent wait mode. This would make sense if CPU utilization were at 100 percent, but it was at just 20 percent during this portion of the test. This shouldn't be too much of a concern, since professionals won't likely do much work from the VidCap32 utility, anyway; it will more likely be used as a diagnostic tool, if at all. And at lower resolutions, the VidCap32 utility worked fine.

Welcome Extras: MPEG Transcoding

ViewCast is touting Osprey's ability to transcode MPEG source files into Windows Media or Real "on-the-fly." What this entails is sending an MPEG data file to the hardware decoder, which then decodes it and passes uncompressed data to an encoder. The touted benefit is that a videographer can keep high-resolution MPEG master files and produce/reproduce encoded versions as needed.

That's great, but aside from the performance boost that hardware MPEG decoding offers, this same function (encoding from a single high-resolution master) can be accomplished in any number of different ways with or without MPEG, and with or without hardware acceleration. So while it works great on the Osprey 2000 DV Pro, I don't find "MPEG transcoding" terribly new or exciting. Still, if you have a great deal of encoding to do on an ongoing basis from MPEG masters, you'll appreciate it.

MPEG transcoding assumes that you already have high-resolution MPEG master data files, whereas MPEG encoding creates high-resolution MPEG master data files in the first place. Though not at all revolutionary, the ability to capture high-resolution compressed data (without having your CPU do the compressing) and store it to disk in an open format is wonderful. MPEG is a reliable way to store high-resolution video master data.

In addition to its suite of utilities, ViewCast includes software development kits for its own API (called "OPI"), DirectShow, and Video for Windows. Better yet, the company includes sample applications with source code for your low-level programming enjoyment.

The ability to use multiple boards in a single system is supported. And a 19-inch rack-mount version of the breakout box (which supports two cards' worth of I/O) is available.

In terms of features, completeness, support, and power, the Osprey 2000 series exemplifies the high end of video capture. The drivers are solid, the demo hardware worked perfectly, and the board's performance is outstanding, overall. The price is high, but my experience with both the Osprey 500 DV Pro and the Osprey 2000 DV Pro has been mostly headache-free. And for some organizations, that's worth the cost at any price.

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