Video Frame Grabber with PCI-bus
The PCI+Grabber
represents a very high performance, compact and versatile solution for capturing
video images and bringing them to the PC. The board is suitable for applications
including PC-TV, Video phones, Remote Surveillance, Machine Vision and many
more.
As a bus master, the board takes advantage of the high speed PCI
bus and places the captured video image directly into host memory. The video
data may be scaled, color translated, and burst transferred to a target location
on a field basis.
The board has a programmable DMA controller allowing the user to arrange the video data stream to best fit the application. The board supports complex clipping formats of the video data. This allows the video image to be used together with pull down menus, overlaying graphics etc. The fields may be interlaced into memory or sent to separate field buffers in packed or planar formats. In the planar mode, the Y, Cr and Cb data is separated into three streams which is suitable for applications
where data compression is accomplished by software and a CPU. The board allows for previewing one field while capturing another.
The PCI+Grabber features three surge protected
software selectable composite video inputs. The board can also be used with two
composite video signals and one S-Video signal.
A programmable video front end allows for adjusting Contrast,
Saturation, Brightness and Hue. The board can also perform a Coring function,
forcing all pixel values below a programmed level to become zero. This results
in a better image quality since the human eye is more sensitive to variations in
black images. The PCI+Grabber can also capture data from the
Vertical Blanking Interval making it suitable for teletext and closed captioning
applications.
A connector on the PCI+Grabber allows for
mounting of an optional digital video camera interface board. The board also
features an EEPROM for reading and storing user data.
A comprehensive library written in 'C' is shipped with the board. Example routines show how to take advantage of the PCI+Grabbers high performance.
