USB device for uncompressed NTSC capture

USB device for uncompressed NTSC capture

[Steve Fink]

This may be the wrong place for this question. I've been looking at a
number of places, but haven't managed to figure out what I need to
know.

I have a camera that only has analog NTSC output. I would like to get
the frames into my Linux laptop. The frames are 8-bit deep grayscale
and 320x240. I assume that they are getting expanded up into NTSC
format or something; I'm ok with that; I don't need it to be very
accurate.

On my desktop box, I have a Hauppage WinTV PCI card that hands me the
frames back via v4l. That works perfectly. I want to do the same on my
laptop, only using USB rather than PCI for obvious reasons. (1394
would be fine too. But I want something cheap.)

What devices are supported that would give me what I need? I scrounged
around on the linuxtv wiki and various other places, but it seems like
all of the USB sticks with analog inputs were doing fancy mpeg-2
compression, which kinda sucks for me:  I'm not saving the frames
anywhere, I'm processing them as they come in. So I'd rather not have
them compressed and then decompressed immediately. Also, although
quality isn't that big of a concern for me, latency is.

I don't need audio, TV tuning, a remote, or any of the other usual
crud that these things seem to have. I just want to get a stream of
frames at a rather low resolution, with the bits relatively
unmolested. I suspect that there may be many USB devices that would do
this for me, but for the life of me I can't figure out how to tell
which ones they are.

I am currently running the 2.6.26 kernel that comes with Fedora 9
(2.6.26.6-79.fc9.i686), but I'm happy to upgrade, downgrade, or
compile my own drivers.

My code is currently using v4l (either v4l1 or v4l2, autodetected).
I've never understood the V4L vs DVB thing, but I could switch to a
different API if necessary.

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Re: USB device for uncompressed NTSC capture

[Carl Karsten]

Steve Fink wrote:
> This may be the wrong place for this question. I've been looking at a
> number of places, but haven't managed to figure out what I need to
> know.
> 
> I have a camera that only has analog NTSC output. I would like to get
> the frames into my Linux laptop. The frames are 8-bit deep grayscale
> and 320x240. I assume that they are getting expanded up into NTSC
> format or something; I'm ok with that; I don't need it to be very
> accurate.
> 
> On my desktop box, I have a Hauppage WinTV PCI card that hands me the
> frames back via v4l. That works perfectly. I want to do the same on my
> laptop, only using USB rather than PCI for obvious reasons. (1394
> would be fine too. But I want something cheap.)

if it only has analog out, how will the 1394 help?

but cuz you say it will, first place I checked:
http://microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0246465
2-Port FireWire 1394 CardBus PCMCIA Adapter RoHS
$35

I have seen cheaper.  i saw one in the bargin bin once for $10.   really should
have grabbed it.

Also, many laptops come with it.  not that that makes it cheap, but maybe you
could pick up an old one for $100 or less.  feel like messing with linux on ppc
mac?  (no clue if you can find a mac for under 100.)

Carl K

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Re: USB device for uncompressed NTSC capture

[Steve Fink]

On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 12:26 AM, Carl Karsten <carl@personnelware.com> wrote:
>
> if it only has analog out, how will the 1394 help?

Oh, sorry. I was thinking of an external device with analog input and
1394 output. My laptop has a 1394 port.

Ah, yes. They do exist:
<http://www.firewire-1394.com/canopus-advc55.htm>. But (1) I was
hoping to pay about a quarter of that, and (2) I still don't
understand the Linux side of it  -- although it seems like it
shouldn't be a problem; I'm assuming I can use a generic 1394 video
capture driver, whereas USB would be device-specific. There is a v4l
driver for 1394, I hope?

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