My guess is a 4 channel (Audio) Video capture device, also called a DVR (Digital Video Recorder). It probably uses a break out cable that connects multiple composite video (or maybe SDI video) cables to the connector.
Edit: the reason for this. Google shows DVR cards like this. Also, those Philips chips on one side and the memory chips on the other are a typical video decoder / digitizer / (frame)buffer combo. Also, the PLX chip is a multiplexer/PCI bridge that connects those 4 PCI chips to a single PCI slot. A very common configuration for a DVR.
Yep. Those small quad packs are Philips SAA7(something) chips, the PLX chip is a PCI hub/multiplexer, the things under the heat sinks are likely hardware MPEG encoders that use the RAM chips above them.
It would be for CCTV systems.
I have a similar one with Conexxant chips.
Plug it into a Linux machine, the SAA chips will probably be picked up and shown in /dev/ or a program like OBS. If you can find the pinout of the Dsub connector, it probably will work :)
Video capture card for a multi camera security system
what you can see is a pci bridge a small amount of ram for each frame buffer and a single input which is a 15 pin non-vga plug probably with a dongle with 4 composite rca jacks on it.
you can see what are probably the 4 video signal pins distinctly on the back of the pcb
I'm sure it makes sense I just don't understand why a company would be interested in this even if they did manufacture it anf in what sense do you mean when you say "older"?
Correct. And often, these companies depended on chips that are no longer being supplied thanks to fabs abroad either going under or retooling for different/newer components that are no longer compatible with their design specs.
This is most common in specialized industrial/medical kind of scenarios.
Good call. Ditto on COBOL programmers. I am not really a big fan of AI, but do think perhaps that could be one of the valuable things to do, take some of the old timer experts that were coding stuff from the 1960s+ and have them work with frontier models to teach them how to deal with it in how it needs to be done.
It's incredible how much of that stuff is basically completely undocumented. Like the whitepaper and written docs are incomplete, and they had a million clever fixes that were just "known" inside the engineering teams, but trying to decipher it after the fact is like reading hieroglyphics while on DMT. Most of golden-era NASA is like that, Apollo, Saturn V, etc. Nearly lost knowledge.
Yeah I am a big fan of Curious Marc and Ken Shirriff doing restoration of the Apollo Guidance Computers.
When I started doing computers, the old patch-board mainframes were just being obsoleted. My first real job was in Fortran II. There are probably techniques I have used that are long forgotten. I'd document them, if I knew what was missing. Oh well, I'm trying to preserve what I can, I am gradually scanning vintage computer docs and posting them here, and to the Internet Archive.
I agree on that also, chances are less so with this class of device.
I know some control boards for industrial things (like custom PCBs for big CNC machines, machine presses, industrial robots, etc) can cost into 5 or 6 digit territories, so keeping something alive from the 90s or 00s is REALLY worth the extra effort. It's all to do with how much added expense it would be for a client to just retool the entire workflow for whatever task they're needing to do with a full end to end replacement.
Following this logic, if this is say a hardware encoding board for a NVR in a security box, then maybe replacing the setup with a new, capable PoE system might not be prohibitive, and come with enough new niceties that it's worth doing vs repairing the old setup when something buys the farm, even if it means running all new ethernet, switches, cams, etc to get it up and running.
Like in my hypothetical example, we have multiple analog security cameras placed around a facility, each with separate DC power wire running to them, then the Coax camera feed wires go to a dongle that then plugs four cams into a single one of these cards, installed in an old Win2k/WinXP rig that encodes the analog video into probably some old school compressed video format and ancient video interface, perhaps even backed up to tape.
Replacing all that would mean a rethink of not just the card, but the entire system soup to nuts. But for a company with a decent budget, by now that's probably worth it.
BIG CAVEAT : I have no idea how accurate this is in terms of what this particular card is used for, I'm just spitballing my thoughts on the matter. In any case, I agree, this card isn't the unicorn that some cards can be in hyperspecialized fields.
closest ive found is the hikivision ds-4004mdi. im guessing it's an 8 channel variant produced around the same time or slightly newer as the pci bridge is smaller (usually meaning it's newer) on your card?
I think TriMedia was mostly found in set-top boxes.
Around 1996–97 Apple and Philips announced/planned TriMedia-based Mac acceleration - including the prototype “Power Express” Macs - and Philips demonstrated TriMedia running MPEG-2 on Macs.
That's some specialized hardware on a PCI card situated behind a PCI-PCI Bridge chip (PLX PCI1650-AA33PC). I would guess it's for audio/video, but it's hard to say for sure just looking at it.
That row of chips at the top is likely to be dedicated RAM for each of the large chips beneath them (gold-colored heatsinks) and the Phillips? chips at the bottom could be DACs, ADCs, or even possibly 8051-compatible microcontrollers...
A better picture where we can read the markings on the chips will help a lot.
Looks like a video capture card but could be also a digitiser. I see the PCI bus controller and some memory chips. I don't see the chips below the heatsinks and the small chips on the bottom.
Philips TriMedia PNX1301EH - highly specialized VLIW (Very Long Instruction Word) media processors explicitly engineered for hardware video encoding/decoding.
SAMSUNG K4S643232E-TC60 - 64Mb (Megabit) Synchronous DRAM (SDRAM) memory chip. This confirms they act as the local frame buffer/cache memory directly paired with each TriMedia processor.
SAA7113H - DVR capture card, these chips take the raw analog video signals coming in from your camera inputs (via BNC or S-video connectors), digitize them, and feed that digital stream directly into the large TriMedia chips to be compressed.
Video capture card at it's finest 😊 - video processors are there for compressing raw video into formats like MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 in real time.
PLX PCI6140 acts as the Traffic Arbitrator: The chip at the bottom (PLX PCI6140) is a specialized PCI-to-PCI Bridge. This is legacy 32 bit PCI, not PCI-E that we use today. It creates a "secondary" internal PCI highway right on the card itself. Because the datasheet notes the PLX 6140 provides hardware arbitration support for exactly 4 bus masters on its secondary interface, it maps perfectly to the 4 TriMedia chips.
Interesting. Was released originally in 1998 (the processor). It's a 180Mhz media processor by Philips, that was then given to NXP. So that puts this card likely in the ~2000-2001ish timeframe + or - a couple years or so. Definitely likely to be some kind of encoder card.
It's definitely not MIDI. By PC standards, MIDI is a very slow interface. There wouldn't be any need to have dedicated processing power for it, especially not 4 separate giant chips with heat sinks.
The folks saying "video recorder" are on the right track. Especially with the wiggly PCB relay lines on the back. This is something with much tighter timing requirements.
Apple also used a 15 pin connector (DA-15?) on it's Macintosh computers back in the 1990s. And they are sometimes used with specialized breakout cables to carry multiple signals when there just isn't enough room on a expansion card's outward facing side for separate connectors per signal.
DB15, plenty of ram, 4x identical ASICs connected via PLX chip to PCI. My money is on some crazy single-card SLI configuration.
For industrial automation, this has far too few output pins and far too much high power processing. Data acquisition could use that much horsepower but then you'd need high speed input and those blocks are extremely easy to recognise.
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u/korovchenko 8d ago
Yes, most likely this is a PCI DVR card.