Osprey 800a, User Manual

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Installation Steps
16 Osprey by Variosystems
Designed for live/instant video-on-demand adaptive features
An important feature of the Osprey digital HD capture cards is the ability to adapt automatically to
input signal format changes without having to stop, to reconfigure, and to restart the video
application run by the card. The “designed for live” feature distinguishes the Osprey digital HD
capture cards from cards used for ingesting video into video editing systems or other applications.
With the Osprey digital HD capture cards, you can create the following events:

Switch on-the-fly between SD and HD
– The Osprey 820e accepts SD and HD analog video, VGA,
DVI and HDMI standards and automatically re-syncs while the Osprey 845e accepts SD and HD digital
video and automatically re-syncs; without interruption, when the signal formats change between any of
the supported SD and HD modes.

Reduce and eradicate post-production work
– Minimize or eliminate post-production work to make a
live broadcast available as Instant VODTM (Instant Video-on-Demand) at the end of the broadcast by
encoding a Save-to-File version of the live stream. The stream can be configured with its own
watermark if desired.

Create anything-in something-out video
– One of the most popular applications of the Osprey digital
HD capture cards is to accept SD and HD input for live Internet video streaming. Generally, the
expected viewing experience is for the viewing window to have fixed dimensions regardless of the
aspect ratio or pixel count of the incoming video. Most of the popular video encoders require that these
parameters not change during the encoding session. The Osprey 800 series cards can automatically
adapt, through size and scale, the incoming video to match the selected output parameters. For
example, a broadcaster can freely switch sequences between a live HD studio feed, and SD promo clip
form a payout server and then return to live HD 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Capture and preview pins
Some applications use DirectShow Pin Properties with Osprey cards. For Capture and Preview pins,
these properties are always per pin.
At the top of several Osprey 800 series Property tabs is the Pin Type field with a drop-down list. The
drop-down list in Figure 14 has Capture, Preview, and Both. This selection works similarly to other
Osprey models, which typically enable these selections using radio buttons.
Figure 14. Pin type list box
The three choices, Capture, Preview, and Both, provide the opportunity to determine whether the
changes you make on the Property tab should apply to both the capture and preview pins
associated with the other controls on the page, or just the desired pin – Capture or Preview.
Decide what type of pin to select based on several criteria. Software applications that use Osprey
video capture cards and AV stream drivers communicate with the hardware via a Microsoft-
developed software layer named DirectShow®.
DirectShow is a collection of software objects, or object library, for working with video, audio, and
other multimedia data. The object library primarily consists of
filters – objects that process video
and audio data and are connected or chained together into filter graphs .