the osprey-500 can deliver to the host 30 frames per second (fps) full resolution ntsc (720x480) as well as 25 fps full resolution pal (720x576). the osprey-500 uses direct memory access (dma) to efficiently perform this delivery of both video and audio data to the host. once the data is in host memory, performance is directly affected by how the data is processed. the different encoding options of the windows media encoder have varying cpu requirements and are outside the scope of this manual.

    the osprey-500 also supports directdraw for displaying video with minimal load on the system processor.

    it should be noted that uncompressed video bandwidth is very large. video at 640x480 with a 16bit color format at 30fps results in more than 18mbytes/sec of data transfer across the pci bus. thus pci bandwidth issues, which may result due to other high bandwidth demanding devices on the pci bus, can limit performance.

    for example, having pci based scsi controllers may consume large amounts of pci bandwidth if lots of scsi disk activity is occurring.