While designing an early Digital Video Recorder (DVR), Lakeshore Software discovered that the video capture boards at the time were not sufficient in a number of ways: 1) video could only be captures into files without the ability to analyze each frame, 2) the image quality was not good, and 3) the capture board was expensive. Reports had shown that a new video capture chip had very nice quality, but there was no means to use the chip on a PCI card in a personal computer.
 

Lakeshore Software’s partner at the time designed a PCI card specifically for the new video capture chip. The board could be manufactured at about 30% of the cost of the existing capture boards. However, the new chip required DMA (Direct Memory Access) and DMA required a device driver. Lakeshore created the device driver, implemented the image transfers through DMA, and was able to address the chip’s setup registers directly. This gave Lakeshore Software and our partners a big competitive advantage in the DVR market.