Parvus Corp recently unveiled the MPEG104, a PC/104-Plus form-factor encoder that captures high-quality analog video and audio streams, encoding them in compressed MPEG-1, M-JPEG, or JPEG formats, and sending them to a host computer over a 32-bit PCI bus.

The module supports as many as four composite-video inputs and one stereo-audio input at full NTSC or PAL frame rates. The card also integrates four reprogrammable, general-purpose digital I/O channels for system control, as well as a 2-Mbyte SDRAM frame buffer for storing single frames or snapshots of incoming video.

It encodes pictures at both QSIF (quarter-source-input format) and SIF resolutions at up to 30 frames/second and supports single-fame sizes as large as 720?576 pixels. The MPEG104 fits live-video-encoding applications, such as remote-surveillance systems, video recorders, video servers, external MPEG-1 encoding boxes, motion detection, and traffic monitoring. The MPEG104 is in stock and sells for $226 (100 units).