Exar Corporation, a leading supplier of high-performance integrated circuits and system solutions, recently announced the release of the VRC7008E digital video recorder (DVR) PCI Express (PCIe) add-in card. Designed for professional video surveillance applications, the VRC7008E card features the Exar S7100 software configurable processor and performs H.264 encoding on eight channels of up to 960H NTSC/PAL video at full resolution and frame rate. With 960H video, surveillance professionals realise a 33% greater horizontal field-of-view (FOV) than that provided by typical CCTV video cameras. This increased FOV reduces the number of surveillance cameras required and increases resolution for a given coverage area.
Extensive video pre-processing coupled with Exar’s Intelligent Encoder gives the VRC7008E pristine video quality while maintaining high compression levels. This results in tremendous reduction in storage costs for surveillance installations using the VRC7008E card. The programmable accelerator of the S7100 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 S7100 video processor drives 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 also can be parsed to reduce their storage requirements over time to retain a valid video archive for longer periods than would otherwise be possible. This reduces both operating and storage costs.
The VRC7008E 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 VRC7008E is compatible with all Exar S7000-based PCIe cards. OEMs already familiar with the SDK can integrate the card into their software in a matter of hours. With clear SDK documentation and the support of Exar’s application engineering group, new design teams also achieve 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. The card also supports eight channels of alarm I/O and an RS485 interface for remote camera control through an I/O header with an optional I/O card.
