Greg Vines
POWAY, CALIF.
Manzanita Systems is a leading provider of MPEG solutions for digital television, VOD, digital ad insertion and streaming video applications. Our transport stream multiplexer and analyzer software have become defacto standards for broadcasters, post production houses, service providers and manufacturers of digital video technologies. Our products are available as standalone applications, software development kits and custom hardware/software solutions.
As president of the company, I oversee all aspects of its operation, from product engineering to technical support. Chief among our goals is to design products that work across a spectrum of different systems, and to provide our customers with the best possible solutions for their particular needs and applications.
NEEDED CARD FOR SPECIALIZED APPLICATION
As part of our company's product development efforts, we needed an ASI I/O card with specific features for our TStore MPEG-2 transport stream capture and playback system. We knew that we would need a card with a stable and accurate time base and also a high degree of reliability, as our customers would be using this device in a wide variety of controlled and uncontrolled environments, and often they would be driving modulators or other sensitive equipment with it.
In the past, we've used a variety of cards from different vendors in many of our custom project designs. However, our engineers had experience with DVEO cards from Computer Modules and found the DVEO cards and application programming interface (API) to be easy to use and very stable products, making them ideal for this application. In addition, the DVEO people were open to the idea of adding features to meet our requirements.
We ended up selecting the company's DVB Master Dual/i FD-RS cards with a PCI interface. This product has dual ASI inputs, two buffered ASI outputs, and a mechanical relay to bypass the ASI input directly to the output should power fail.
Like all of DVEO's DVB Master cards, the Dual/i FD-RS product features a very accurate clock, performs jitter management, looks after packet arrival time stamping and provides unlimited PID filtering. As a bonus there are also drivers and APIs included for use with both Windows and Linux operating systems. The DVEO card also provides information on signal quality, so users can elect to switch to a secondary input signal if degradation is noticed in the primary feed.
The card's input section features include synchronization of incoming transport stream packets, automatic 188 and 204 packet size detection, as well as transport stream code stripping. The card's transmitter section features an enhanced transmit rate "fine tuning" control, the ability to add null characters to 188 byte packets and also a black burst external clock input. The company also provides a high stability oscillator with less than 2.5 ppm drift on an optional basis, should this be required for special applications. The DVB Master cards are also offered in PCIe format.
We found that the DVEO card had all of the features we needed and this made integration into our product truly a snap.
We've been very happy with our choice of the DVEO DVB Master card for our application, as it provides the sort of performance and reliability that our systems are known for.
Greg Vines has served as president of Manzanita Systems for more than 14 years and has more than 17 years experience in broadcast engineering. He may be contacted atinfo@manzanitasystems.com.
For additional information, contact the DVEO division of Computer Modules at 858-613-1818 or visitwww.dveo.com.
