HCA0xxI is a real-time video and audio compression card series from 4 channels to 16 channels. It compresses video in H.264 with hardware chips, which can significantly reduce your CPU loading. With the compression card, you can save your CPU for other tasks such as video content analysis or software compression for USB-webcam or legacy video capture card.

Once you correctly install your compression card, you should see the “HCap” modules under the Capture Source of Channel Settings. Select the channel you want to bind and bind it.

The compression card can produce 4 streams: the raw video stream, master video encoded stream, secondary video encoded stream and audio encoded stream. The “raw video stream” is typically for real-time preview and the encoded streams are for webcast or local storage.

General

In the General tab, you can set up the mask regions to remove sensitive areas from encoded video streams. Please note that the mask areas will be reflected only on encoded streams but not on the raw video stream.

If you unchecked the “Enable Raw Video Stream”, only encoded streams will be generated. Unless you have special reason, you should left this box checked because raw video stream is necessary for preview. If there is no raw stream but just encoded streams, CyeWeb will automatically decode the first one for preview (this will increase your CPU loading).

In this tab you can also configure the video attributes and frame rate.

Under the Hardware Compression tab, you can configure the encoding parameters.

-          De-interlace Level
you can configure whether you want to de-interlace the video before it goes into compression. Note: de-interlace is reflected only on encoded video stream but not raw video stream.

-          Enable Timestamp
you can configure whether timestamp should be embedded on the encoded video streams. You can insert additional text other than just timestamp, but the text must be in English. Note: timestamp is embedded only on encoded video streams but not raw stream.

-          Quantization Coefficient
you can configure the quantization coefficient for compression. The valid range of this setting is 12 to 30. The lower the value the better the compressed video quality, at the cost of bigger data size. Typically the value of I-frame should be 3 more than the others. For example, the values for the best compressed video quality are 12, 15 and 15 for I, P and B frame respectively.

-          Key Frame Interval
The maximum interval (in frame) between key frames (or I-frames) during compression. If the compressed stream needs to be broadcasted to Internet, please set this value to around 100. A bigger interval would produce smaller-size data. This could be good for local storage but may cause problem on Internet broadcast due to insufficient network bandwidth, which causes frame dropping. If a key frame is dropped, all frames until the next key frame will become useless and be dropped too.

-          Resolution
you can configure resolution for both master and secondary encoded streams. Here is a list of allowed resolution:

Please note that if you select 4CIF, only 2 channels will be active for that DSP.

-          Bit Rate Type
you can select Constant Bit Rate (CBR) or Variable Bit Rate (VBR). CBR is appropriate for webcast, and VBR is appropriate for local storage.

-          Maximum Bit Rate
you can set the maximum bit rate for CBR. This setting has effect only if CBR is selected.