EngadgetHD reports on New 3xDVD;
Comin’ straight outta Thuringia is the first news we’ve heard in a year about HD DVD’s red-laser cousin, 3X DVD. CDA Datenträger Albrechts GmbH has announced its started production of 3X DVDs, which are basically HD content, compressed with VC-1 or MPEG-4 and AACS DRM, on a standard red laser DVD that is readable only by HD DVD players. The advantage is that it costs the same to produce as a regular DVD, and CDA is apparently producing dual-sided DVD-10 discs, with standard DVD content on one side, and HD on the other. Of course, with several German studios dropping HD DVD support (along with a few others you may have heard of) its hard to see who will take advantage of CDA’s new capabilities.
Someone needs to step up and put a recordable HD format onto the HD endoscopy sets in the OR. Even the HD systems record in SD. I am waiting for recordable Blu-ray or even better a flash or disk based AVCHD solution.
You should be able to capture the hd signal from the endoscopy set right? If so you could use a regular pc to capture it and save it to some format like e.g. x264.
You would think it would be that easy! The problems are up until very recently there was no HD outputs on the systems. Now some have DVI. None in wide use have firewirre or HDMI although that should be coming. Alo all the equipment i nthe OR needs to be medical certified and tested so you can’t bring in your Pc or laptop and plug in. They need integrated solutions with standard formats!
Stryker has an all digital endoscopy product line.
DIgital capture system:
http://www.stryker.com/en-us/products/Endoscopy/VisualizationandDocumentationSystems/DigitalDocumentation/index.htm
HD platform brochure:
http://www.stryker.com/en-us/products/Endoscopy/VisualizationandDocumentationSystems/DigitalDocumentation/SDCHD/ssLINK/028542
And the olympus evis exera II system has both SDI and firewire outputs:
http://www.olympus-europa.com/endoscopy/2001_2010.htm
(also featured on the apple website: http://www.apple.com/science/profiles/paloalto/ )
Yes I know all of these systems well and if fact just did surgery with one of them all day today. There are other ones as well including Smith and Nephew, Linvatec and Stortz just to name a few. If you search on HD here you will see some research I did with some of these. I have used almost all of them by now and they differ greatly in design and functionality. Being all digital is not the issue here. None of these systems as far as I have seen include a native true HD capture and archiving option to easily give the surgeon a portable HD archive of the procedure. The only options for that are direct digital capture to flash media or recordable blu-ray or HD-DVD. Networked file access is impossible for most surgeons outside the hospital and as I wrote we cannot just hook up a laptop to an SDI output in the OR. I keep pounding this drum. It is coming trust me.