Hewlett-Packard Co is enhancing the versatility of its Precision Architecture RISC workstations with the launch of an integrated video board developed for the company by Santa Clara, California-based RasterOps Corp. The VideoLive Card is claimed to be the industry’s lowest-priced 24-bit full-motion video board for Unix workstations, and it operates using only its own circuitry, independent of the workstation’s CPU or graphics frame buffer, so that users can display full-motion video in an X window without slowing down other applications that may be running. It also enables users to freeze high-resolution video frames, which can then be used as images in compound documents, image databases or otherwise distributed on the network; choose among multiple video sources with the click of a mouse button when BBC1 and BBC2 are showing different matches at Wimbledon; and position and scale the video window. Hewlett-Packard sees the thing being used for videotaping and playing back of customer-service presentations for computer-based training applications, by government agencies keeping an eye on Cable News Network, or by financial traders watching Channel 4’s Business Daily while developing models or forecasts in other windows. Television tuners, videocassette recorders, video cameras and laser disk players can all feed the VideoLive Card, which doesn’t care whether you’re in a country that uses the excellent PAL, the brilliantly-coloured Secam or the ghastly NTSC system. The Motif-based user interface provides video-display and frame-grabbing functionality via the mouse. Video images can be sent to others on a network via the SharedX program, which enables users to share X-based application windows across a multivendor network. The company says that all its HP 9000 Series workstations are shipped with software-based image capability that supports rapid display and transmission of images over a network using the Joint Photographic Experts Group standard, which compresses the file size of colour images by a factor of 20-to-1 with virtually no visible degradation. Models 705 and 710 also feature integrated audio. The VideoLive Card plugs into the EISA slot on the HP Apollo 9000 Models 720, 730 and 750; it’s $2,275 next month.
