Add-in DVR PCIe card designed for professional video surveillance applications

Latest from Exar is the VRC7016XE, a digital video recorder (DVR) PCI Express (PCIe) add-in card designed for professional video surveillance applications. The VRC7016XE card features two Exar S7110 software configurable processors and performs H.264 encoding on 16 channels of up to 960H NTSC/PAL video at full resolution and frame rate. With 960H video, surveillance professionals realize a 33% greater horizontal field-of-view (FOV) than what typical D1 CCTV video cameras provide. The increased FOV reduces the number of surveillance cameras required and increases resolution for a given coverage area. The VRC7016XE is designed specifically for video surveillance equipment OEMs. The card is controlled via the Intelligent Encoder Software Development Kit (SDK) for either Linux or Windows. The VRC7016XE is compatible with Exar’s S7000-based PCIe cards. With clear SDK documentation and the support of Exar’s application engineering group, OEM design teams can integrate the card into their software easily, achieving rapid time-to-market. The low profile, short form factor card is readily embedded in compact industrial PCs and servers. A high bandwidth PCIe interface provides connectivity to the host. Two user-configurable spot monitor outputs are provided, eliminating the need for additional output cards and reducing the cost of surveillance installations. The card also supports eight channels of alarm I/O and an RS-485 interface for remote camera control through an I/O header with an optional I/O card. Extensive video preprocessing coupled with Exar’s Intelligent Encoder gives the VRC7016XE pristine video quality while maintaining high compression levels. This results in tremendous reduction in storage costs for surveillance installations using the VRC7016XE card. The programmable accelerator of the S7110 at the core of the intelligent encoder delivers multi-stream encoding of baseline, main and high-profile H.264 Advanced Video CODEC (AVC). In addition, the S7110 video processors drive H.264 Scalable Video CODEC (SVC) compression, enabling flexible and efficient resizing and resampling of multi-stream surveillance video. Compressed video can be adapted to match the available network bandwidth and decode capabilities of the client. SVC streams can also be parsed, reducing storage requirements over time to retain a valid video archive for longer periods. The VRC7016XE is available for software integration and qualification now, says the company.