Hey,
there is always DVDA. 😆 (google lookup required)
It can be run off a laptop directly (just a software license) or I was going to provide it as a 19" rack mount unit like Netmc. To be honest, with the amount of time I’m offshore at the mo, I’d rather just put up a download page as manufacturing/servicing/supplying is a complete pain.
Today we ran the software from a USB pen on my laptop and captured video and grabs to the same pen so its pretty portable. I was going for simplicity in the GUI as I’ve seen what happens to a datadog under pressure when he’s lost survey data and starts hunting for the tapes!! There is a very large red button with a label which reads RECORDING (when it’s recording!). There’s the usual array of features like "Available space: in time and Gbytes" and an equally large "Screengrab" button.
Statistics
———–
Records 30fps (NTSC) or 25 fps (PAL) at 785×685 or 640×480 pixels in 24 bit colour using 1.8Ghz centrino processor and 1Gb RAM.
JPG or bitmap screen grabbing with files saved and dated.
MPEG-4 video grabbing – 0.2Mb/s compression from full video. If you have any other codec that you like (i.e if your company has a standard) then the system can scan and add to our existing codec library-ours can be opened using windows media player). Compression is scalable depending on your bandwidth.
All the files are saved in directories either c:\todaysdate\digital_stills\
or c:\todaysdate\video. These can be accessed using winXP or you can review from within the software.
I’ve put in a network/internet broadcasting facility so you can fire live video to the beach (or someone’s mobile phone), video overlay of time/comments/bitmaps. I asked the rest of the guys in our group what they’d like to see and picture in picture was asked for. (Don’t know what they’d want to watch whilst they’re flying!).
I’ve just trialled this software this afternoon (aboard semi-sub at the moment), captured 1min files to 15Mb each and extracted image grabs from the video live. This was handed to company man on a 500Mb stick.
No fuss.
