OPTIMOD-PC INTRODUCTION
1-17
Overview of an OPTIMOD-PC Installation
An OPTIMOD-PC card installs in a PCI slot in an IBM-compatible host computer. The
computer’s PCI bus must be Plug & Play PCI Version 2.2 compliant, 32-bit, 33MHz,
with a transfer rate up to 132MBytes/sec. OPTIMOD-PC will operate in a 3.3V or 5V
PCI slot, and with bus extenders.
Almost all recently manufactured PCs meet these PCI bus specifications.
OPTIMOD-PC V2 is supported on Windows XP (SP2 or higher) computers. It will usu-
ally work on Windows 2000 computers (SP4 or higher) but Orban Customer Service
does not support this platform. No other operating systems will work.
OPTIMOD-PC’s driver is multi-client but will only support multiclient operation in a
Windows XP environment. Windows 2000, while compatible with OPTIMOD-PC’s
driver, only supports single-client operation.
Users who need to stream to multiple encoders from a single OPTIMOD-
PC must use Windows XP.
More than one OPTIMOD-PC card can be installed in a given host computer. The
number of cards is limited only by the number of available PCI slots, which may re-
side in a PCI expansion chassis.
Conceptually, there are two options for operating OPTIMOD-PC:
simple
and
net-
work
(see
Figure 2-1: OPTIMOD-PC Network Scenarios
on page 2-4).
•
Simple
operation will only control OPTIMOD-PC cards that are installed in the
same PC that is running the Orban application.
•
Network
operation allows you to control one or more OPTIMOD-PC cards over a
network, regardless of whether the OPTIMOD-PC card is located in the control-
ling computer.
Both modes of operation require you to run a
server
application in the background
on any remote computer housing OPTIMOD-PC cards. However, you do not need to
run the server if you are running the Control Application in a computer that has no
OPTIMOD-PC cards installed.
In this case, the Control Application would be dedicated to controlling
OPTIMOD-PC cards located in other computers on the network.
The server is installed automatically when you install the OPTIMOD-PC software and
is configured to run as a “Windows Service.” The server application is an intermedi-
ary that enables the Orban Control Application to remotely communicate with the
OPTIMOD-PC card(s) installed in a given host computer. One instance of the server
application handles communications for all of the OPTIMOD-PC cards in a given host
computer. When the host computer is booted, the OPTIMOD-PC driver initializes the
DSP on the card, initializes the I/O settings, and sets the processor settings to a de-
fault value. After that, the OPTIMOD-PC server finishes starting up and then resets
the processing parameters and I/O settings to their previous power-down values.
The service completes this task just before the Windows Log-On screen appears.
