The new software allows police officers, who may not be video or computer experts, to gain access to evidence more quickly.
A suspect can be shown evidence and charged immediately rather than having to be bailed to return when footage is available.
The company has been working with the Home Office and police partners to develop SiraView.
Says the company: “The proliferation of digital CCTV with its numerous proprietory formats has made it more difficult for the investigator to view material.
“More rapid and straightforward access to CCTV evidence will make police use of CCTV evidence more common, more effective and reduce delays in both investigating and solving crimes.”
The Home Office Scientific Development Branch has been trialling SiraView. The trial is designed to establish the most common digital formats seen by each police force across the country.
The company says there are a myriad of largely incompatible systems from hundreds of international manufacturers offering thousands of different products that, in the main, adhere to no common open standards. This results in largely proprietory systems and recordings.
“The police service is employing technical staff to recover and process digital CCTV footage but the Police and Criminal Justice System often has difficulty playing back in these formats with each different system requiring specialist software to be installed on a PC and understood before footage can be played.
“The manufacturer’s software can often interfere with other software and rarely has the full functionality required by the police and other users.”
SiraView, developed in partnership with the Metropolitan Police, has its own software to do the decoding rather than producing a “wrapper” for the CCTV manufacturers’ proprietory software. This is said to preserve the evidential quality of the CCTV.
It includes the correct aspect ratio, automatic decoding of multiplex footage including date and time and no frame dropping or picture cropping.
“As a result most officers can view footage directly on their PC rather than having to wait for the footage to be sent to a laboratory for it to be viewed and put into a format that can be played on standard PCs.”
It runs on Windows Vista, XP and 2000 and currently takes up less than 10MB.