Tech Source, Inc. has successfully added driver support for Wind River VxWorks real-time operating system (RTOS) to its low power Condor VC100x H.264 video capture and compression card.
This support is most beneficial to those developing mission and safety critical video streaming applications for aerospace and defense customers, such as unmanned aerial vehicles.
Selwyn L. Henriques, President and CEO of Tech Source Inc., said: “Most mission and safety critical applications use a real-time operating system, so our support for VxWorks will enable us to target the safety critical market and applications that require capture and encoding of video data with lower latencies.”
“Our Condor VC100x card has been designed for use in UAVs that require low power and yet high profile H.264 compression in a compact, lightweight form factor,” continues Mr. Henriques. “VxWorks provides UAVs real-time capability while keeping size, weight and power (SWaP) demands to a minimum.”
“The solution enables a rapid upgrade to legacy systems, and, when combined with open standards like OpenGL, POSIX, Linux, FACE, and ARINC 653, can rapidly deploy enhanced video across a wide range of aerospace systems,” said Chip Downing, Senior Director of Aerospace and Defense at Wind River.
Tech Source’s XMC form factor module – featuring an H.264 video encoder with baseline, main and high profile support up to Level 4.1 – supports up to 4 composite video inputs (NTSC/PAL/SECAM) or up to 2 SDI inputs (SD-SDI/HD-SDI), all of which are selectable through the provided API. The VC100x also has 2 stereo or 4 mono audio inputs.
The Condor VC100x card performs H.264 encoding in hardware to minimize CPU usage. Video data is captured and stored in files and made available to customer applications for processing, analysis or display on a local graphics card.
This solution is available in various ruggedised levels and has conduction or convection cooled variants. While Windows, Linux, and VxWorks drivers are available by default, other real time operating systems (RTOS) such as Integrity and LynxOS may be optionally supported on both X86 and PowerPC platforms.
A technical data sheet is available at:
http://techsource.com/products/embedded/condor-vc100-xmc-series-h264-compression/index.html
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