PCI Express® Support

Transitioning to the New PCI Express®: How It Affects You

The PCI and PCI-X bus will soon be heading out to pasture, so your video capture capabilities would be better served by upgrading to PCI Express® (PCIe).

Don't lose your competitive advantage as others migrate to the new bus standard, which offers much higher performance.

The next generation of ViewCast Osprey video and audio capture cards - designed for PCIe - have arrived. ViewCast Niagara streaming systems are also powered by Osprey, our technology that helped launch Internet streaming.

When you upgrade to the far superior PCIe technology, you can expect more power, more channels and dazzling performance.

Check out our Osprey-700e HD, Osprey-240e and newly introduced Osprey-450e to find out why ViewCast is the global leader in PCIe video streaming cards.

PC manufacturers have been quietly retiring the old workhorses, PCI and PCI-X add-in card buses, in favor of the latest-and-greatest PCI Express® (PCIe) bus. Today's PC graphic cards demand extreme performance that can only be achieved via the PCIe bus. This is also the same reason PCIe is the perfect bus for video capture devices.

There are still a few computers out there with a PCI-X slot or two, but you have to pay close attention to the system architecture to ensure optimum performance.

So what does this mean for you, the professional video content provider?

According to Mark Hershey, vice president of engineering at ViewCast, "Some computers out there still have the older slots, and many are still architected to offer acceptable PCI/PCI-X bus performance. But the older buses have fallen into the 'low performance' category, which makes them less than ideal for video capturing."

During this bus transitional period, you basically have two options:

(1) Carefully investigate the system architecture and motherboard before selecting a host computer and thoroughly test its performance, or

(2) Purchase breakthrough technology PCIe ViewCast Osprey capture cards or a ViewCast Niagara streaming system, powered by Osprey technology.

Using video capture cards designed with the new PCIe bus offers additional benefits, most notably higher channel density -- more video and audio inputs per host computer. Hershey adds, "The new bus complements the performance of modern multi-core designs. It also eliminates a bottleneck, allowing you to use all of the computer's power. The ViewCast Osprey card line offers the latest PCIe bus and other new technology that work together to streamline processes, automate tasks and offer noticeably upgraded picture quality."

ViewCast offers multiple options in the new PCIe standard. One is the Osprey-700e HD high-definition (HD) and standard-definition (SD) combination video capture card, which won TV Technology magazine's 2007 STAR Award. Read the product review in HD Video Pro magazine's February 2008 issue.

The other ViewCast PCIe card option is the Osprey-240e professional analog video capture card. Both are designed specifically for broadcasters and feature Osprey's legendary audio/video capture quality and 24x7 live reliability that led to winning Streaming Media magazine's 2007 Readers' Choice Award in the Hardware Encoding category.

Buy the ViewCast Osprey-700e HD, Osprey-240e or the latest Osprey-450e online today to enjoy peerless flexibility and performance.

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