Build your own VideoPhill System

VideoPhill will work on any PC that is built from reliable components and properly configured.  The main requirement for the VideoPhill system is that it should have an Osprey video capture card for capturing, and that you should plan your hard disk capacity according to your needs. Make sure that your graphics accelerator supports Direct3D (version 1.3. or newer).

We also recommend:

  • a solid case with lots of space to provide good ventilation
  • a good power supply and perhaps a case that provides a redundant power supply
  • a UPS device if you expect power losses and don't want a second of recording to be missed
  • one hard drive for system boot and one (or more) for video storage
  • enough fans in the system to provide a stable, low temperature (use s.m.a.r.t. disk monitoring to provide hard drive temperature measurements)
  • a separate system for playback and export (to release any unnecessary load of the capturing system)
  • 2x1GB of RAM
  • 1.6GHz+ CPU (IMPORTANT - this is a basic system that is capable of providing 1/2 or 3/4 of full resolution recording (equivalent to VHS quality), which is more then enough for compliance recording purposes. If you require full screen capturing, you will need much faster system with at least 2GB of memory, and of course, an appropriate HDD storage for your material)
You should be aware that the computer used for recording purposes should be used for nothing else. That means that you should install Windows XP on it, with a minimum of additional options.

Since your encoding computer can also be a file server for VideoPhill Player, you should scale your processor accordingly, so it will be able to deliver power for the remote client access and for video encoding.

After you have built your PC for use with VideoPhill, install Windows XP (32-bit) or Vista (32-bit) and proper drivers for your system. Make sure that you have installed WDM Osprey drivers.

Download the required Osprey drivers here.