Looking For; Simultaneous Capture from Multiple Sources

[cprince]

Hello,

I have been searching for a solution for capturing multiple sources simultaneously on one computer/ recorder unit. Ideal capacity would be 8 sources @ 30FPS in NTSC with audio. I have found some offerings from Picolo and Avermedia, but these seem to be specific to surveillance and I am unsure if they would be appropriate for rebroadcast quality. We currently have a Niagara Server with an Osprey 230. One problem with the Osprey/Niagara setup, other than capacity, is that it will not capture in .MOV format. Capturing in either format (.Mov and any other format; AVI, WMV....) is extremely important (It wasn't when we bought the Niagara).

I wont say that money is no object but I do have a large budget to do this.

Any ideas would be appreciated.


--
"Luther destroys the Gond"

[TaoTeWingChun]

Wow - Sounds like a nice project!

I'd probably go with 2 - 4 clustered Win2000/2003 Servers with up to 4 Hauppauge WinTV 250/350 cards in them. Doubt you'll get 8 cards i a single box, but 4 is do-able, as a buddy of mine has this setup on his personal PVR system at home.

Good luck!

TTWC

[Cornucopia]

Your probably NOT going to find much of a better system than something like your Osprey system. Certainly not security system types. Particularly if you've got quality requirements (DV or better, etc) and # unit requirements.
Assuming what you're capturing is saved as DV-AVI Type2, you could easily set up a network server/shared drive (probably RAID) that the original AVIs are saved to (from the cap cards) and have that be considered the "watch folder" for other PCs each of which are running batch conversion software (like Cleaner, Procoder, Squeeze, WMEncoder, AVIsynth scripts, etc) which would automatically convert to the alternate format(s) of choice. Then those might all be saved to a "final" shared folder. Not exactly "captured in multiple formats", but pretty near. Some time delay would be involved, but that's about it.

Scott

[edDV]

or you could go the Medusa approach
http://www.snapstream.com/Community/Articles/medusa/default.asp

[BJ_M]

you want/need broadcast quality ... multiple sources, multiple codecs at once ..

you should contact digital-rapids for one of their solutions ... http://www.digital-rapids.com

or

capture in YUV or mjpeg .... broadcast quality -- up to 4 boards per system (4 channels per board)

Videum Quattro http://www.winnov.com/products/capture/videumquattro.htm




there is a ton of security cards like this -- but all of them are mpeg4

ospry you already know about .. there are also dedicated hardware machines for this -- the price can go into the 100's of thousands ... to pretty cheap ...

[cprince]

Thank you for all the replies; this will give me a good start on what to research.

As a stop-gap measure I am now just looking to capture in MOV, just so that we can be ready for September classes, but I will be charged with setting up a pod casting and or streaming video server.

Lots of research!!




--
"Luther destroys the Gond"

[DVNinja]

I'd probably look at the new Osprey 440 from Viewcast. This is a 4-channel card, and you can stack two of them (or more if you want) into a PC to get 8 channels.

As far as I have been able to find, after many an exhaustive search, there is no real-time QuickTtime encoder (.MOV files). However the Ospreys are not format-specific so captured files can be transcoded off-line. They can also handle any other format (MPEG, WME, Real, Flash, etc.)