Streaming Webcam captures an Endangered Species

Webcam captures an endangered species
Video Systems, Jan, 2001 by Trevor Boyer

While the giant panda is an endangered species, web-casting certainly is not. Press conferences, day care centers, and even surgical operations have been receiving the streaming treatment for the past few years. So it's not shocking that Zoo Atlanta now lets its website visitors keep tabs on its two giant pandas over the Internet.

Zoo Atlanta reports that thousands of visitors have logged on to watch Lun Lun and Yang Yang strip and eat leaves from bamboo stalks, nap, and play in their log tepee. The webcast, at www.zooatlanta.org, serves not only as a virtual zoo-going experience, but also as a marketing tool for a fund-raising effort - the "Save a Species: The Campaign for Giant Pandas" research program.

In choosing a video capture card, Zoo Atlanta had a simple primary concern: image quality. "The quality of the streaming video from the PandaCam was paramount for Zoo Atlanta, so that people could truly enjoy watching Lun Lun and Yang Yang over the Internet," says Derek Kolb, the zoo's director of information technology. The zoo decided on ViewCast.com's Osprey-200 cards to capture to video and encode the pandas' antics.

"The Osprey video capture cards delivered the high-quality streaming video we needed," Kolb says.

Osprey-200 features both video and audio capture, advanced DMA for full 30frames/s performance, and closed-caption capabilities. Included is Direct Draw, which allows 30frames/s overlays to video screen with minimal CPU employment. PCs can host multiple Osprey-200 boards, enabling multichannel capture and encoding.

The Osprey-200 card is a higher-end version of the Osprey-100, which ViewCast.com says is one of the most widely used capture cards in streaming media.