Video to laptop - PCMCIA card or USB adapter?

[[1ponders] (Paul)]

In my never ending adventure in image capture, I have the opportunity to use a video camera similar to the GSTAR camera. However I don't have a suitable video input plug on my laptop. I've had a bit of a look see for what accessories are available and I've come up with this sort of thing, or would I be better off using a USB2 adapter?

Any thoughts on this?

[Moon_Shine]

Hi,
Would a Video Card be a much better way to go? and that way you will have more graphics memory as well.

[[1ponders] (Paul)]

Probably, but I'm not that confident in opening my laptop and installing that sort of thing. I'm much more a plug and play person . I'm not interested in watching TV with it just capturing video for processing.

[mojo (Terry)]

That's exactly what I was looking for!
A USB capture device is very slow. Firewire is much faster (but expensive).
I didn't even think there was a PCMCIA card that did that sort of thing. But that would be the way to go. It would be much faster than trying to get 25fps through USB. There are USB capture devices but if you want the full frame rate, then it comes down compressed as mpeg, which is no good for astronomy. And with uncompressed images you would only get 5fps (maybe).

So PCMCIA is the way to go. Nice find!

[[1ponders] (Paul)]

There ya go Terry Now you can help me. Will I need anything else to capture video this way...you know programs etc? I doubt that I could do it with K3CCDTools.

[mojo (Terry)]

• I assume your camera has composite out. So the capture device needs to have a composite in. (Did I even need to say that?)
• The capture device needs to be able to capture uncompressed frames. Usually they can capture in mpeg 1/2/4. But you don't want that. You want uncompressed raw images. (I suspect they all will be able to capture uncompressed frames but you have to find out for sure)
• If it's a video device then any video application should see it just as another video device, so you can use it with whatever.
• There is no way of knowing how good the capture device is until you try it. And there's the rub.

I can't believe I didn't think of a PCMCIA capture card

[Harb]

I get 25fps @ 720x576 via my USB 2 conection without any problems ever......

cheers

[[1ponders] (Paul)]

Terry, if it isn't an AVI from a Webcam it's over my head Composite????

[Dennis]

Be careful with these devices as I have had problems with a PCI card which used my CPU for processing the video stream. When I switched to a dual tuner HDTV card that did all the work on the board via hardware, the problems with dropped frames and audio/video sync, freezing, etc all vanished.

Now, I can be recording one station in HD whilst watching another in a window whilst browsing IIS.

So, if there is a choice, pick the unit that does the entire grunt work in HW, and not SW which hammers your CPU and other resources.

Cheers

Dennis

[[1ponders] (Paul)]

Thanks for the advice Dennis, any suggestions on HW.

[Dennis]

Hi Paul

We may be talking slightly different applications here, but when I used (in 2000) a Hauppauge PCI TV Tuner card that did not have any on-board hardware processing capability, my 1.8G P4 with 512M RAM and a 7200rpm HDD could not keep up with the work load, so I had frame freezing, dropped frames, loss of sync. etc and could not use the PC for anything else whilst watching or recording a TV program.

When I switched to an external Hauppage WinTV-PVR-USB2 TV Tuner box ($300), with all the processing being done in the box, the problem was fixed, even on my Notebook which is a 3 ½ year old Centrino 1.4G, 512M and 80G HD 5400 rpm.

Similarly, the Fusion HDTV Dual Tuner PCI card ($199) in my desktop does all the grunt on board in the HW.

All the above are TV Tuner cards for watching TV on your computer and recording to your computer, essentially using it as a personal video recorder.

So, check the USB2 or PCMCIA devices you are interested in and see if they process the video stream using built-in hardware (often referred to as hardware compression) in the device itself. If not, I suspect that your computer will have to wear the processing load which might possibly lead to some the problems I had earlier on, before I purchased the more expensive TV Tuner cards.

Cheers

Dennis

[[1ponders] (Paul)]

Thanks Dennis.

[mojo (Terry)]

Originally Posted by Harb

I get 25fps @ 720x576 via my USB 2 conection without any problems ever......

Uncompressed or mpeg stream from the capture device?

720x576x24x25 = ~30MB/s
USB1.1 has no hope (a few frames/sec). USB2 is about ~25MB/s sustained rate and 48MB/s burst.
I didn't think it was possible to squeeze full motion uncompressed video into even USB2. Wouldn't be the first time I've been wrong

Originally Posted by [1ponders]

Terry, if it isn't an AVI from a Webcam it's over my head Composite????

It's the RCA jack on the camera. And it probably has S-Video out as well.
AVI is the file format you save to...
Camera->Composite Video->Capture Device->Computer->Hard Disk (AVI/BMP/MPEG/etc. files)

[bird (Anthony Wesley)]

Ideally you'll be after a composite video to firewire capture box (external) and then just plug it into your firewire port on the laptop.

I've seen these on sale at places like TheImagingSource, but they are not cheap :-(

Bird

[[1ponders] (Paul)]

but they are not cheap :-(

No they're not

Thanks bird