Most efficient Video Streaming

[viSci]

Hi All,

I would like to capture video (30Hz, 24bit color, 640x480) in sync with some DAQmx channels.

The data needs to be streamed to disk and retrieved back to display in realtime with data.

My question is what hardware is recommended to support the video portion of the system.

I am planning on a cameralink interface that has hardware triggering but am not sure if I will need any special RAID hardware

for the streaming to disk. Also what is the most efficient format to use:

IMAQ->AVI->Disk

IMAQ->JPEG->Disk

IMAQ->(Some other GPU compression)->Disk

IMAQ->Array->TDMS

I am not really going to processes the video so would it be possible to use some 3rd party activex controls that are optimized for GPU video streaming?

[Tim_S]

My question is what hardware is recommended to support the video portion of the system.

I've not tried what you're proposing, however it seems you are going to be sending a lot of data strait to disk. RAID, of whatever flavor, itself won't help that, however it may let you link enough hard drives to have the space you need. I believe your bottleneck is the hard drives ability to write data fast enough. Anything with very high bandwidth may also be designed for a computer room and not a shop floor (15k RPM drives do not survive long when exposed to 108-degC temperatures instead of nice A/C environment).

Tim

[crelf]

I would like to capture video (30Hz, 24bit color, 640x480) in sync with some DAQmx channels. My question is what hardware is recommended to support the video portion of the system. I am planning on a cameralink interface that has hardware triggering but am not sure if I will need any special RAID hardware for the streaming to disk.

I'd probably use a PXIexpress camerlink card and one of these (there are other modles with more space) so you can get the data straight to disk without going through the processor or PC infastructure.

The data needs to be streamed to disk and retrieved back to display in realtime with data.

Use DIAdem - it does all the work for you (video example here).

http://www.ni.com/swf/demos/us/diadem/vidsync/vidsync.swf

[viSci]

Ok, but I do not understand how to stream to the raid disk without having to go through the processor.

I presume that you still have to use the IMAQ driver and do a grap on the camera and then do something with the

imaq image. It seems that NI only supports triggered image capture not video.

[Antoine Chalons]

Hi All,

I would like to capture video (30Hz, 24bit color, 640x480) in sync with some DAQmx channels.

The data needs to be streamed to disk and retrieved back to display in realtime with data.

My question is what hardware is recommended to support the video portion of the system.

I am planning on a cameralink interface that has hardware triggering but am not sure if I will need any special RAID hardware

for the streaming to disk. Also what is the most efficient format to use:

IMAQ->AVI->Disk

IMAQ->JPEG->Disk

IMAQ->(Some other GPU compression)->Disk

IMAQ->Array->TDMS

I am not really going to processes the video so would it be possible to use some 3rd party activex controls that are optimized for GPU video streaming?

Hi,

That's about 26Mbyte/s that you have to save to disk, what's the maximum duration? Maybe you could avoid the RAID and just have a good SSD (the Crucial C300 256Go is a pretty nice product!).

A few years ago I made a small streaming system with a non-triggered Basler Camera - A2xx I think - 60fps, 8bit, don't remember the frame size. At the time the most efficient method I found was IMAQ > BMP > Disk and wait till the acquisition ends to generate the AVI file.

SDDs didn't exist nor NI streaming hardware so we just got an HP workstation with a built-in RAID, it worked just fine.

Also, in April 2007 I made a compression filter benchmark - in french, but that might help anyway.

hope this helps

[Tim_S]

Ok, but I do not understand how to stream to the raid disk without having to go through the processor.

I presume that you still have to use the IMAQ driver and do a grap on the camera and then do something with the

imaq image. It seems that NI only supports triggered image capture not video.

The driver and hardware handles the streaming to disk.

You can perform video capture with NI hardware. Check the examples as there is one in there (assuming you have IMAQ driver installed).