System Recommendations

Operating Systems Support

Cinegy Player PRO runs on the following operating systems: Windows 10, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2016.

Operating system recommendation: Windows 10, Windows Server 2016.

Caution
We recommend updating Windows OS to include the latest Microsoft updates and hotfixes.

Supported Hardware

Note
Cinegy products work only on machines with CPU supporting minimum instruction set SSE4.1
Note
These system recommendations use older hardware which has been previously tested. The CPU’s listed should be used as a guide to select modern equivalent options and not as direct requirements.

The required hardware largely depends on the video codec and resolution to be played back at each machine running Cinegy Player PRO.

Hardware Recommendations for SD Playback

The following configuration has proven to be reliably sufficient for SD playback: Core i7 4770K CPU, 2x 4GB of DDR4 RAM, SATA-2 SSD drive. Gigabit Ethernet is recommended.

Recommended hardware: Any Windows 10 certified PC. NVIDIA GeForce GT 240 or GT 430 graphics card or better.

Hardware Recommendations for HD Playback

The following configuration has proven to be reliably sufficient for HD playback: Core i7-6800K CPU, 4x 4GB of DDR4 RAM, SATA-2 SSD drive. Gigabit Ethernet.

Recommended hardware: HP Z640 or similar. NVIDIA GeForce 200 series graphics card or any better one with DirectDraw.

Hardware Recommendations for UHD Playback

The following configuration has proven to be reliably sufficient for UHD playback: Supermicro X10 series motherboard, dual Xeon E5 2697v3 CPU, 8x 4GB of DDR4 RAM

SDI Video Card Support for Monitoring

Cinegy Player PRO supports the following SD/HD SDI video cards: Blackmagic DeckLink family of cards, DVS Centaurus II (LT), Atomix LT.

Recommended hardware: Blackmagic is good value for money for this task.

If other applications are running on the machine at the same time, additional memory may be advised.

Graphics Card

There are no particular requirements with regards to graphics card unless the optional video output over SDI board is supposed to be used as a control video monitor output. Any recent graphics card from NVIDIA will work. Even integrated graphics adapters as found in motherboard chipset by Intel will work fine in most scenarios.

Note
If you are using an NVIDIA graphics card, we recommend that you optimize its performance by setting the "Prefer maximum performance" value for the "Power management mode" parameter in the NVIDIA Control Panel.

For HD playback motherboard integrated graphics, to date, are not fast enough; the graphics adapter should be equipped with at least 256MB of memory and the memory bus width should be 128 bit or better.

There are NVIDIA and Intel QuickSync acceleration options available for H.264 and H.265 video decoding in Cinegy Player PRO. The acceleration is highly recommended to be used for high-density formats playback (e.g. Full HD, UHD).

In order to be able to use the hardware acceleration options you will need to install the NVIDIA graphic board (based on Kepler or Maxwell generation GPU) into your server:

  • NVIDIA GeForce Series (started from GeForce 600)

  • NVIDIA Quadro Series

Note
After installing a dedicated graphics card, please disable the onboard graphics card (e.g. Matrox) using the Windows Device Manager > Display Adapters and selecting the "Disable device" option for that card.

Supported video hardware for control monitor video output:

  • Any VGA card that can output the DirectX overlay on video out. DirectX/3D 9 acceleration support is recommended.

  • Blackmagic Design DeckLink series SDI video boards.

  • DVS Centaurus II (LT), Atomix LT video boards.

File Format Support

Cinegy Player PRO supports the use of the following file and video formats:

Apple QuickTime (supporting all locally installed codecs including alpha channel support), Apple ProRes / ProRes422, AVI (supporting all locally installed codecs including alpha channel support), AVID DNxHD (in AVID compatible MXF)*, DV, DV25, DVCAM, DVCPro (DV50), DVCProHD (DV100), HDV, IMX, XDCAM SD, XDCAM HD, XDCAM HD422, XDCAM EX, MPEG-2 (I-frame and long GOP up to 1080i 4:2:2), H.264 (MP4)**, MXF with MPEG-2 Long GOP, MXF AS-03, Panasonic P2 (DV, DV50, DV100, AVC-Intra) and Windows Media.

* Should be requested separately

** MP4 H.264 files are handled by internal decoder, although in case of any issues it falls back to QuickTime