ViewCast Introduces New Capture Cards

ViewCast.com (www.viewcast.com) announced that they have begun shipping the newly introduced Osprey-210 and Osprey-220 capture cards. These cards are designed to provide functionality a step beyond the Osprey 100, a video-only capture card, and the Osprey 200, an entry-level audio and video card.

Osprey has sought to alleviate the load on the CPU during the capture process by offloading functions onto the hardware to allow a single machine to support several cards running simultaneously. As with the Osprey 200, the combination of audio and video within one capture card allows for improved audio and video sync, stated John Bishop, Osprey Product Manager.

The new cards support RealNetworks RealVideo 8 and Windows Media 7 capture and encoding for both real time and on-demand streaming. Both the 210 and the 220 support AVI capture for use with leading editing applications. Both also offer hardware audio sampling rates of 32, 44.1 and 48 KHz, and this feature allows the user to choose how they would like to balance the audio and video quality rate, given the end-user's limited bandwidth. According to Bishop, the option to change the sampling rate is new, as the previous Osprey cards had preset sampling rates.

The Osprey 210 is an analog capture card with a BNC connector for composite video input, an S Video connector, unbalanced stereo audio inputs and an audio loop-back feature for monitoring of the captured source. The Osprey 220 offers all of the features of the 210 with the addition of a break-out box and balanced-stereo audio inputs via XLR connectors.

In other related news, Sonic Foundry (www.sonicfoundry.com) announced that it has entered into a OEM partnership with Canopus Corporation. Versions of Sonic Foundry's ACID 2.0 and SIREN Jukebox Xpress 2.0 will be bundled with the Canopus DVRexRT Professional and DVStorm NLE solutions.