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.
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