Product category:
Manufacturing IT hardware
News Release from: Advantech (UK) | Subject: DVP-1410
Edited by the Manufacturingtalk Editorial
Team on 30 June 2004
Hardware Video Compression
Hardware Video Compression - Creating New Market Opportunities
For more than 20 years, many industrial applications have used personal computers (PC) to control and log whole systems, benefiting greatly from it There are increasingly more functions common to PCs that are providing industrial markets with the computing power to drive their applications, especially for networking, where system integrators can connect the office to the factory via a network that can also link many devices to become one large automated system
This article was originally published on Manufacturingtalk on 25 Jan 2002 at 8.00am (UK)
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An easy way to upgrade the IPC with video functionality is through modular design.
PCI-bus add-on cards with a software encoding library is the typical way to handle the video function, but hardware MPEG4 encoding with USB interface is a better way to upgrade with video from our view.
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Why USB 1.1 ? USB is a flexible interface between PC and devices which was developed in the Pentium age.
Currently, most PCs and Industrial PCs are designed with an USB host controller on board as a standard interface.
USB 1.1 is the most popular standard before USB 2.0 built into the South Bridge PC chipset.
For IPCs, around 80% of boards still use USB 1.1 as their common interface.
DVP-1410 uses a hardware video compression engine to reduce the data size before data transfer to a PC, just 6 Mbps, which is less than 12 Mbps of USB 1.1 bandwidth, is the reason why DVP-1410 only needs a USB 1.1 port to fulfill the D1 resolution for customer applications.
Also designed with low-power technology, USB's 500mA power supply is satisfactory for the DVP-1410's execution.
DVP-1410 is compatible with most PC based systems.
Why MPEG4? MPEG4 is an ISO/IEC standard developed by MPEG (Moving Picture Experts Group), the committee that also developed the Emmy Award winning standards known as MPEG1 and MPEG2.
MPEG1 has been used as a VCD standard that can be encoded by CIF (352 x 240 in NTSC system or 352 x 288 in PAL) resolution at 30/25fps, the data bit rate is around 1.5 Mbps.
MPEG2 was developed for high quality applications such as DVDs and can be encoded by D1 (720 x 480 in NTSC or 720x576 in PAL) resolution at 4 Mbps and above.
Regarding MPEG4 standard, it was developed for Digital television/Interactive multimedia, using better compression technology to optimize the data rate for data transmitting and storage.
It can be encoded to D1 resolution at 1.5 Mbps.
Some movie contents use MPEG4 to encode DVD movie (4.7GB) as a MPEG4 file on a CD disk (740MB) but keeping similar quality.
Why a hardware compression engine? There are a lot of consumer applications using software encoding technology to compress video data using a high performance CPU such as Pentium 4 or Xeon processor, but needs a good heat dispersion design and a strong power supply.
Unfortunately, most industrial applications are embedded in harsh environments like factory or vehicle devices which can't use a high performance processor inside.
Essentially, video is one way of communication in industrial applications that means computing power needs to reserved for mission control like as PID calculatation and sequence control, programmers need the computing power to do most major function for their software running so they may need a video compression engine to help save computing power.
Summary.
Designed for new industrial grade applications, DVP-1410 is an ideal way to upgrade video functionality.
DVP-1410 is a compact sized, modular design, USB bus MPEG 1/2/4 hardware encode module which supports Microsoft Windows 2000/XP SDK for system integrator development.
Due to the on-board hardware compression engine, DVP-1410 uses little CPU loading to encode video data and save video files as DivX/Microsoft format on MPEG4 standard.
DVP-1410 supports up to four modules in one PC system, set by an on-board DIP switch. Request a free brochure from Advantech (UK) ...
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