Hardware Requirements

Hardware Requirements

The following values are for a setup that mainly deals with ingesting SD material. If your setup requires handling a significant amount of material in higher resolutions than SD, please consult us as the hardware requirements will of course be different.

Video Capture Clients

DVA-Profession was built with effectivity in mind. Therefore a regular off-the-shelf "Office-PC", with average performance properties should do just fine.

Here is a list of minimum hardware requirements for a DVA-Profession video capturing client workstation:

  • Processur (CPU): At least 3.3 gigahertz (GHz) 64-bit (x64) NOTE: at least Dual-Core recommended
  • System memory (RAM): At least 2 gigabyte (GB) of system memory
  • Hard disks: Possibility to attach at least 5 SATA disks (directly on mainboard, or with external controller)
    • 1x >= 30 GB hard disk (Windows system drive). You can use any reasonably sized disk for this purpose.
    • 4x >= 1 terrabyte (TB) hard disks: 2 as "DVA-Capture" volume (RAID 1), 2 as "DVA-Workflow" volume (RAID 1)
  • 1x Soundcard: Required for monitoring and checking of the video's sound quality In most cases, the on-board soundcard of the mainboard will do just fine (depending on its quality) It must at least be able to record/playback 48 kilohertz (kHz) / 16 bits
  • 1x Decent graphics card: In most cases, the on-board display adapter of the mainboard will do just fine There is no need for dual-head output
  • 1x Gigabit (Gb) ethernet network adapter: In most cases, the on-board network adapter of the mainboard will do just fine
  • 1x Video capture/playback card: In our setup, we've used a "DeckLink SDI" card from "Blackmagic design" and we've thoroughly checked its results and performance. Any other capture card that works with VirtualDub should do just fine, but has to be tested.

Reference Setup Example

At the Austrian Mediathek, the following hardware setup was thoroughly tested and is in production use since 2011:

  • Processor: Intel Dual-Core i5 CPU 661 @ 3.33GHz
  • Motherboard: Intel DH57JG, Mini-ITX
  • System memory (RAM): 4 GB system memory
  • Soundcard (onboard): Realtek High Definition Audio
  • Graphics card (onboard): Intel Graphics Media Accelerator HD
  • Network adapter (onboard): Intel 82578DC Gigabit Network Connection
  • Video capture card: Blackmagic DeckLink SDI (legacy and also 4k model)
  • Hard disks:
    • 1x 250 GB Seagate (ST3250318AS)
    • 4x 1 TB Samsung (HD103SJ)

Background Servers

DVA Profession was built with effectivity in mind. A regular off-the-shelf PC, with average performance properties should do just fine as transcoding server, but due to the vast amounts of data it has to process if used with multiple ingest clients, you should consider buying a stronger machine.

  • Processor: at least 3.3 gigahertz (GHz) 64-bit (x64) - at least Dual-Core recommended
  • System memory (RAM): at least 2 gigabyte (GB) of system memory
  • Hard disks: Possibility to attach at least 2 SATA disks (directly on mainboard, or with external controller)
    • 2x >= 1 terrabyte (TB) hard disks:
  • 2x gigabit (Gb) ethernet network adapter: One for communicating with the video ingest stations. Optional: One for data transfer exclusively with the final video archive storage. The 2nd network interface is only required for high-throughput setups.

Reference Setup Example

At the Austrian Mediathek, the following setup was thoroughly tested and is in production use since 2011:

  • Processor: Intel Dual-Core i5 CPU 680 @ 3.60GHz
  • Motherboard: Intel DH57JG, Mini-ITX
  • System memory (RAM): 4 GB system memory
  • Graphics card (onboard): Intel Graphics Media Accelerator HD
  • Network adapters
    • (onboard): Intel 82578DC Gigabit Network Connection
    • PCI-Express card: Intel 82571EB Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 06)
  • Hard disks:
    • 2x 1 TB Samsung HD103SJ