A. System Requirements

This appendix lists what you need in order to install WATCHOUT on a PC.

Computer

A WATCHOUT computer has the following minimum system requirements:

• Intel or AMD dual core processor with four logical processors (4 threads).
• USB port.
• Gigabit Ethernet port.
• SATA hard disk (SSD recommended to drive multiple displays or for playing some video formats).
• 4 GB RAM. Under 64-bit Windows, 8GB is recommended (more RAM will generally not improve performance).
• DirectX 9.0 capable graphics card.
• Windows 10 (recommended, see tweak list), or Windows 7, 32-bit “Home” (while WATCHOUT is a 32-bit application, it’s fully compatible with 64-bit Windows).

NOTE: It is generally not recommended to mix different kinds of display computers/media servers, or graphics cards in one display or projection surface. Nvidia or AMD synchronization cards are required to prevent tearing on LED displays when using multiple display servers.

IMPORTANT: These are minimum system requirements. Faster processor, faster memory, NVMe SSD, faster network, faster professional graphics card with more video memory, etc, will enhance performance.

Live Video Input

To integrate live video into WATCHOUT, each display computer used to show live video must be equipped with a suitable video input, and its driver software must be installed.

Suitable video input solutions include Datapath Vision cards.

Audio

For sound playback a high-quality audio device is recommended. ASIO drivers are preferred for multi-channel. Audio input is required for slaving to SMPTE time code.

Network

The production and display computers must be connected using an Ethernet network. A typical system has 100 MBit Ethernet network ports on all computers and a high-quality Ethernet switch with the required number of ports to connect the computers.

NOTE: A wireless network may work, but is generally not recommended for reliability reasons and affects synchronization accuracy among display computers.