Matrox X.AVCio H.264 Video Record/Playback Card Supports Toshiba Imaging’s New HDTV IK-HR1S Camera

Montreal, Canada .— Matrox® Video Products Group today announced support for Toshiba Imaging’s new HDTV IK-HR1S camera with the Matrox X.AVCio video capture card. Until now, most medical video recording has been done in either SD or HDV formats. The few available full-HD recording devices were prohibitively expensive in many applications. Now, with the Matrox X.AVCio H264 capture card, a developer can easily create a price competitive video recording device that grabs images from HD-SDI in 1080i or 720p and saves them as H.264 files in MOV or MP4 formats.

“The IK-HR1 series cameras are full-HD 1920 x 1080 cameras but at a more economical price,” said Eiji Isumi, Chief Sales Specialist, Toshiba Industrial Camera System Division, Tokyo. “Many users in the medical, broadcast, and scientific fields worldwide want to adopt HDTV resolution video but have hesitated because of the high system cost. Combining the IK-HR1 cameras with the Matrox .X.AVCio H.264 capture card puts the cost within reason even for small clinics and regional TV stations. The HD image quality of the IK-HR1 cameras is fully maintained by the Matrox X.AVCio H.264 video recorder.”

“With our H.264/AVC onboard hardware codec, the X.AVCio card supports CABAC entropy encoding and decoding and delivers stunning video quality at remarkably low data rates,” said Alberto Cieri, Matrox senior sales and marketing director. “It’s at least twice as efficient as MPEG-2 making it ideal to save storage space in archiving applications and to stream video over bandwidth-limited networks.”
About Matrox X.AVCio

Matrox X.AVCio provides a LIVE uncompressed HD view mode with zero frame delay so that a surgeon can see every move in real time at optimal quality. A watchdog feature maintains the video pass-through even in the case of an application or system malfunction. It lets users frame accurately capture HD and SD still images during video capture and playback with simultaneous audio annotation. Still images can be sent to a printer or used for image analysis. An onboard blender allows graphics to be mixed over either a live stream with 0-frame delay or over a playback stream to create a distinct look for the different operational modes. An onboard scaler provides up and down scaling without using CPU resources. Matrox X.AVCio also provides capture and playback of MPEG-2 IBP video in HD and SD. Input and output support for DVI, SD, HD-SDI and 3G SDI, and analog video is also provided.

Availability
The Matrox X.AVCio video board and software development kit (SDK) are now available. Support for the DVI version of the Toshiba camera, the IK-HR1D, will be provided in a new release of the Matrox DSX SDK this summer. It will allow users to grab images from the 1920 x 1080p DVI source.