[AG-TECH] Access Grid Hardware/Software Questions

[Jonathan Klubek]

My group at our university was recently tasked by one of our departments to
construct an access grid facility (this facility will also function for
other types of conferencing and classroom needs also).  After much reading
we have determined many pieces we need to get including things such as
several ClearOne, Crestron and Extron products to control the various audio
and video pieces ranging from scaling windows on the projectors and
switching sources to mixing and cancelling echo on the microphones on the
various tables.   The problem we are running into in examining everything is
with the access grid machine itself.  We have looked at the technology and
many of the pieces of hardware are many years old and we are seeing possible
issues with integration as things such as PCI are replaced with PCI-e.

 

We are looking at going with a Dell Precision workstation T7500 to be the
access grid machine and have thought about adding more memory and a second
processor to it (remember that it will serve multiple purposes. .  My
questions are the following:

 

1.        I see that the software is listed for Linux, OS X, and Windows.
We most likely will be going with Windows so we can support Microsoft Link
also.  This software is listed for Windows XP but does it work with Windows
7 32-bit and 64-bit.  This is extremely important with Windows XP support
coming to a close.  Also, with the increased resources we plan to use it may
be necessary to use 64-bit to take advantage of things such as 4+ GB of
memory.

2.       As mentioned before the technologies listed are out of date.  We
are especially seeing this with the video capture cards and audio cards.  I
was wondering if the following would be supported:

a.       SoundBlaster X-FI XtremeMusic (D)w/Dolby Digital 5.1 (this was the
card option on the Dell) - if not is there a newer card than the one listed
that is?  We will of course need to integrate with our other products.

b.      Datapath VisionRGB-E1 PCI-e RGB/DVI capture card

c.       Osprey Osprey-450e PCI-e Analog video capture card

 

If not we are looking for several recommendations of much newer technology
that is supported as we see this to be extremely important.

 

Jonathan

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.mcs.anl.gov/pipermail/ag-tech/attachments/20110225/edcb2890/attachment.htm>