Hardware selection

PC requirements

  • Supports recent Ubuntu Linux Long Term Support (LTS) releases (amd64). This is currently our only supported platform.
  • Fast CPU. Currently an Intel CPU is recommended due to the use of the Intel Integrated Performance Primitives Library.
  • Memory usage is not expected to be particularly high, because processing occurs in realtime.
  • Sufficient and fast interfaces to cameras. If your cameras are USB3 or Gigabit ethernet, your computer needs to support enough bandwidth.
  • Disk space and speed. For realtime tracking, the tracking data is only modest in size and so no particularly high performance requirements exist. With hardware-accelerated H.264 encoding (see below), compressed video can be saved to MP4 files with only modest CPU and disk requirements. For streaming uncompressed, raw video to disk (with MP4 or the FMF format), very fast disks and lots of disk space are required.

Hardware-accelerated video encoding

H.264 video encoding can be offloaded to hardware, freeing the CPU to continue tracking at full framerate while recording video. Two paths are supported:

NVIDIA NVENC. If an NVIDIA GPU with NVENC support is present, Strand Camera can use it directly via NVIDIA's NVENC library. This requires no additional software beyond the NVIDIA driver. Please see NVIDIA's site for supported hardware.

ffmpeg. Strand Camera can also pipe frames through ffmpeg for encoding. Any hardware encoder that ffmpeg supports (including NVIDIA NVENC, Intel Quick Sync, and AMD AMF) can be used this way, provided the appropriate ffmpeg build and drivers are installed. Software encoding via ffmpeg (e.g. libx264) is also possible but will use substantially more CPU.

Camera requirements

Basler cameras using the Pylon API and Allied Vision cameras using the Vimba X API are supported.

Basler cameras

Due to the use of the Pylon API, any camera which can be used in the Pylon Viewer can be used in principle. In practice, we regularly test with the following cameras:

  • Basler a2A1920-160umPRO
  • Basler a2A1920-160umBAS
  • Basler acA1300-200um
  • Basler acA640-120gm

Allied Vision cameras

Due to the use of the Vimba X API, any camera which can be used in the Vimba Viewer can be used in principle. In practice, we have tested with the following cameras:

  • Allied Vision Alvium 1800 U-240m