Transform a PC into a digital video recorder

DECEMBER 20--BFi OPTiLAS (Evry, France;www.bfioptilas.avnet.com), a Pan-European distributor in the imaging and detection market, is now offering the Vitana PixeLINK PL-A544 FireWire video converter supported with NorPix StreamPix software. This combination can transform a PC into a VCR. The PL-A544 box converts PAL or NTSC analog video signals from industrial video cameras, camcorders, and medical video devices into FireWire (IEEE 1394) digital video data.

The Streampix graphical user interface can store live uncompressed or compressed video directly into a hard-disk drive or RAM memory. It is then possible to export the sequence files into tiff, bmp, jpeg, and image formats, among others.