Chapter 1 — Getting Started
3
Argus Features
You'll probably find it helpful, too, to look over our user's guide, the
Argus
Encoder Family Version 2.6 Installation and User Manual,
which describes the
operation of the various Argus encoders. Among other topics, it includes a discus-
sion of the Spectrum’s Aladdin HASP
®
software protection key (“dongle”), that
grants or denies permission to use each of the multi-stream encoding components.
As mentioned earlier, you have the option of turning on one, two, or all three of
the optional secondary streams, assuming that the HASP device attached to the
encoder grants permission to use them. You should keep in mind, though, that
each of the secondary encoders requires additional processing power. You may
find that running all three of the low-bitrate encodes at once pushes your CPU
usage prohibitively high. As you experiment with the multi-stream encoding
option, remember that you can reduce the CPU usage of any one of the low-
bitrate encoders by decreasing its horizontal and vertical resolutions and by
decreasing its bit rate. Of course, if you decrease the mux rate (or video bit rate)
of the primary stream, you'll also reduce CPU usage. Observing the Windows
task manager as you encode should help you to determine the ideal settings for
your customized multi-stream encoder.
Argus Features
New for this Release (2.6.5)
•
Upgraded the WMF Registry Table to support Microsoft Windows Media
version 9 (Spectrum users only).
Programming Changes and Version History
The API for Argus version 2.6 is based on the same easy-to-use COM interface
that was introduced in version 2.2 of the Argus encoder software. Because we
made very few changes to the FilterManager interface, you will not need to
extensively modify your existing applications when you upgrade to version 2.6.
Release 2.6.3 featured the following changes and enhancements:
• Allows unconditional operation, including Dolby AC-3 encoding, under
Windows 2000. This fixes a performance issue in Release 2.6.2.
• The Momentum software was upgraded, allowing the user to perform AC3
encodes on a Windows 2000 system.
• In previous releases, when the Adjust-GOP-Time-Code option was turned
on during a “seamless” pause/resume encode, the first GOP header after
each resume was not being stamped, so the time code in that GOP header