System Recommendations

Operating Systems Support

Cinegy Player PRO runs on the following operating systems: Windows 11, Windows 10, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2016, Windows Server 2019, Windows Server 2022.

Operating system recommendation: Windows 10, Windows Server 2019.

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, an 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.

Caution

Cinegy Player PRO 22.8 supports the latest NVIDIA boards which require new NVIDIA drivers and a new SDK to be utilized. For that reason, the minimal NVIDIA driver version is 456.81. Before starting any upgrades, please make sure that the OS under which you are running Cinegy Player PRO and a model of the NVIDIA board you are using are supported in the version of the NVIDIA driver you choose.

Note	Please perform the process of NVIDIA drivers update only upon stopping Cinegy applications. For detailed instructions on installing NVIDIA driver, please refer to the NVIDIA Drivers installation article.

Note	Daniel2 GPU decoding is supported by NVIDIA video boards that have CUDA Compute Capability 3.5 and higher. If the NVIDIA video board has the CUDA Compute Capability of an earlier version, then use Daniel2 CPU decoding.

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 a NVIDIA graphics board (based on Maxwell or Pascal generation GPU) into your server:

NVIDIA GeForce Series (started from GeForce 600).

NVIDIA Quadro Series.

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.

Supported File Formats

Using Cinegy Player PRO saves you the trouble of using any other playback tools or applications, as it supports a wide range of file formats:

Format

Description

MP3, WAV, M4A, OGG

Audio-only files.

AVI

Uncompressed or compressed AVI playback depending on machine-local installed AVI codecs.

MXF

OP-Atom (e.g. Panasonic P2) or OP1A (e.g. XDCAM) with specific Application Specification (AS) support for AS-03 (MXF for delivery) and AS-11 (MXF for contribution). MXF playback supports the following codecs: Daniel2, AVC-Intra 50/100, DV, DVCPro50, DVCPro HD, generic H.264, generic MPEG-2 long GOP or I-Frame, IMX30/40/50, Sony XDCAM , XDCAM EX, XDCAM HD, XDCAM HD422, etc.

MOV

AVC-Intra 100, DV, DVCPro50, DVCPro HD, generic H.264, IMX30/40/50, XDCAM HD422, Apple ProRes 422. MOV files are played with Cinegy Player PRO without any Apple QuickTime components installed.

Note	QT AAC Audio or QT DNxHD playback requires the installation of Apple’s QuickTime for Windows player and the free AVID DNxHD QuickTime component for Windows.

MP4

MP4 files with generic H.264 and HEVC inside.

MPEG-2

MPEG-2 Program Streams (PS).

MCRItem

MCR items – clips or comprehensive Sequences with titles, effects, pictures and voice-overs inside.

RTP / UDP

Video stream playback from a URL.

Raw DV

The DV data stream without a file container.

M2V, M2A

MPEG Elementary Streams.