Junior 4 Features and Software

Video and bitmap image formats
The Junior 4 capture board acquires color or monochrome video images from composite interlaced video signals. The NTSC and PAL color standards are supported. The monochrome video acquisition complies with the so-called CCIR (625 lines) and EIA/RS-170 (525 lines) standards. Acquisition of full frame (two fields) or single field images is selectable.
Before storing the acquired image into the destination memory buffer, a pixel format conversion takes place in real-time. Numerous color or monochrome formats can be chosen: RGB15, 16, 24, 32, Y8, YUV4:2:2, YUV4:2:0, packed or planar, and more.


Acquisition
Before PCI transfer to the PC, the acquired images can be scaled to any format smaller than the original one, down to 1/12. The downscaling process involves a sophisticated hardware device, performing an accurate interpolation in both the horizontal and vertical directions. The image buffer for a downscaled image is smaller in size, and its transfer needs less PCI bandwidth.
Moreover, any part of the incoming image can be retained for further PCI transfer, allowing the user to define a region of interest.
All desirable adjustments can be applied to the images during acquisition, such as video contrast, brightness, color saturation and hue (NTSC only).


Bus mastering
The Junior 4 capture board is a PCI bus mastering agent that directly stores the acquired images into the PC physical memory without CPU involvement. As a unique feature, the Junior automatically recovers the scatter-gather virtual memory mapping to present the data as a regular bitmap image in a user allocated memory buffer.


Driver interoperability
Thanks to its basic architecture, Junior 4 may be operated with most of the Conexant® Bt878/CN878A based drivers.