Movie > Introduction

The CVB Movie Tool makes it possible to stream CVB images into a standard AVI file which may afterwards be viewed with a standard video viewer (like the Windows Media Player or CVB) or which can afterwards be processed with standard video processing software.
The images to be streamed may come from any CVB-Supported Frame grabber, GenICam compliant hardware, or may be generated artificially.

The user has the option to

•add his images to the AVI stream frame by frame, or to

•convey control over the hardware (camear, Frame grabber) to the CVB Movie Tool.

For the operation of CVB Movie of course it is necessary to have a CVB Image Manager and Common Vision Blox-compatible acquisition hardware.
In demo mode CVB Movie is limited in that it only produces AVI files with up to 50 frames.

The AVI files generated with CVB Movie

•may be recorded uncompressed (for speed reasons) or

•may be compressed on the fly with a DirectShow compatible compression codec available on the host.

Standard size restrictions for AVI files apply also to the files generated with CVB Movie.

In addition any selected codec for the AVI compression may impose further restrictions on image dimension or other characteristics (please refer to the documentation of the selected codec if available).
Currently the AVI format generally does not support 10 bit data per pixel.
8 bit monochrome or 24 bit RGB per pixel of course are supported and can be streamed with Movie (please note, that many codecs transform 8 bit monochrome into 24 or 32 bits RGB or YUV color space prior to compression, so that the generated AVI file may ultimately contain three colour planes, whereas the source data had only one).

Video recording is usually a very resource-consuming application.
Without on-the-fly compression of the video data a sufficiently fast hard disk system is required , preferably a RAID stripe set.
Furthermore, CVB Movie has to rearrange (and in consequence to copy) the whole image data for every frame entered into the stream because the streaming format used in DirectShow expects the images in DIB format (upside down), but usually Frame grabbers deliver their data the other way round.
When compression codecs are used it is not uncommon that a colour conversion is carried out before the compression itself (which is of course also quite time-consuming) is carried out and finally the data is written to disk.

To put it short: You will need to check, whether your intended target machine for CVB Movie is capable of giving you the performance and results you expect.
Only with a sufficiently powerful computer CVB Movie will be able of recording at full video speed and resolution.
If you are recording compressed video, it is preferable that during the recording of a sequence the host must not be occupied with other time consuming operations.
Another alternative may of course be the combination of the Sequence tool and CVB Movie.

Refer also the Theory of Operation chapter, where a bit of the necessary background about the way the CVB Movie tool works is provided for the interested reader.
This is followed by a description of the functions of the Movie API.