Python and webcam capture delay?

[Rhodri James]

On Mon, 06 Jul 2009 18:41:03 +0100, jack catcher (nick) <nomail at thank.you>  
wrote:

> Rhodri James kirjoitti:
>>  Does the webcam just deliver frames, or are you getting frames out of
>> a decoder layer?  If it's the latter, you want to distribute the encoded
>> video, which should be much lower bandwidth.  Exactly how you do that
>> depends a bit on what format the webcam claims to deliver.
>
> Well, getting already encoded video from the webcam sounds almost like a  
> free lunch (which it probably is not). At least I wouldn't want to get  
> too long a delay because of the encoding.

Not so unlikely as you might think, since there are very basic M-JPEG and
MPEG-2 on-chip encoders available, and the webcam will have to do some
compression to get the video data into the computer.  USB is not as fast
as it would like to pretend.

> I haven't got the webcam(s) yet, and I guess I can basically purchase  
> any ones I find suitable for getting the job done. Any recommendations?

Sorry, no.  I'm used to getting my video feeds down fibre-optic cables :-)

-- 
Rhodri James *-* Wildebeest Herder to the Masses