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TV to PC board/external box (Read 910 times)
smallfly
TV to PC board/external box
Jan 21st, 2006, 11:45pm  
Hi,

Does anyone recommend any specific capture board to work with a security cam (in my case this one http://www.surveillance-video.com/sonspccdbwca.html ... got the link from the page for performance "Messa di Voce" - Golan Levin).

I look at pinnacle, canopus and leadtek.

-Is an external box would work ? I mean, is the USB2 connection going to be a bottle neck ? (an external board would allow me to move and run the sketch on different machines)
-Can a camera like this be plug to a RCA connector or does the connector on the capture board have to be a "coaxial" connector (some issue of video format - terms like composite, analogic, etc ..)?

About the video format:
This card from Leadtek (http://www.leadtek.com/multimedia/winfast_tv2000xp_expert_2.html)
seems to output "RGB32/RGB24/RGB15/YUY2". I'm correct to say that those video format are better to work with when doing video processing/blob detection/tracking (Less CPU power demanding because of less decompression to do) ?

I read threads, dealing with this topic, in the forum but as you can see I still have questions, and even more in my head, so any advices would be really appreciated.

Thanks,

Links:
http://tmema.org/messa/installation.html
http://www.pinnaclesys.com/PublicSite/us/Products/Consumer+Products/PCTV/PCTV/
http://www.leadtek.com/multimedia.html
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« Last Edit: Jan 22nd, 2006, 2:42am by smallfly »  
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fry
Re: TV to PC board/external box
Reply #1 - Jan 23rd, 2006, 3:38pm  
for the parts that i can answer:

- usb2 is not a bottleneck, it's faster than firewire (400, at least). but if the camera is sending uncompressed data, that can sometimes be a bottleneck. one annoyance with usb2 and firewire cameras, they figure since they have the bandwidth, they may also well throttle the machine with it.

- the video formats are more or less standard. processing works with RGB32 is the same as ARGB in p5, RGB24 is like RGB.

- as for the connectors, that all depends on the card and what you're hooking it to, so i can't really answer that.
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smallfly
Re: TV to PC board/external box
Reply #2 - Jan 23rd, 2006, 5:52pm  
hey,

After getting some information/advices from www.ni9e.com.
I just ordered this external capture card:
http://www.pinnaclesys.com/PublicSite/us/Products/Consumer+Products/PCTV+Tuners/PCTV+Analog+PVR+%28cable_antenna%29/PCTV+100e.htm

It doesn't have a coaxial connection, but I can get a small coaxial to rca connection.

Will it work the same way (in p5) to capture the video stream from the  external capture, as I'm doing rigth now with an iSight (cam = new Capture(this, 160, 120, 30);) ?

The format I will get out from the capture box is MPEG1.

thanks
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smallfly
Re: TV to PC board/external box
Reply #3 - Jan 27th, 2006, 6:02pm  
Ok, I got all my stuff.

Everything is working fine.

The Secuity Cam is hooked up to the PCTV external capture board and the video stream is "received" by Processing.

The image quality is really good (B&W). And the framerate is good too (seems even better than the iSight).

The cam is IR sensitive which is why I got it ;-)
And it 's really great to have a manual zoom (lens - wide angle to telephoto).

The only thing is that there is a fleckering happening at the really bottom of the video (last row of pixels are fleckering green to black) which is annoying when doing motion detection. Any informations about that ?

that's about it.
need to go back and play !
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FloHimself
Re: TV to PC board/external box
Reply #4 - Jan 27th, 2006, 7:03pm  
smallfly wrote on Jan 27th, 2006, 6:02pm:
The only thing is that there is a fleckering happening at the really bottom of the video (last row of pixels are fleckering green to black) which is annoying when doing motion detection. Any informations about that


Can you post some code Could be some synchronization problem...
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smallfly
Re: TV to PC board/external box
Reply #5 - Jan 28th, 2006, 12:04am  
This is not related to any Processing code.
The "flickering" appears also/already in WinVDIG.

Tests I have done:
1. tested with reacTIVision and the flickering is there, but less important.
2. plug the cam directly to my TV and everything seems ok.

At firat I was thinking that this is comming from the capture board, but as the flickering is diferent in WinVDIG and reacTIVision I don't know anymore.

What do you mean by synchronization ?
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