Comments on real time capture from Firewire camera.

[kmlee]

Hi to all

In an earlier post, I wasn't able to get full 60 fps capture from a Basler A601fc IEEE-1394a (Firewire) Industrial Digital Video Camera to disk. The maximum performance is 60 fps at 640x480 uncompressed RGB24 colour. We looked at lossless, then lossy codecs.

Because of requirements this had to be done on a laptop, with all the performance restrictions.
In summary, we decided on using the ffdshow (2004 sse) codec with the MJPEG option and the bitrate pushed to the maximum, constant bitrate. This gave accurate, *verified* 60 fps frame rates in VirtualDub. However, we have not done captures over longer periods.

I include some results and am interested in what others have achieved in terms of good quality, real time video video capture at full frame sizes/rates.

Cheers!

Configuration:
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Fujitsu Lifebook Centrino 1.73 Ghz 512 MB RAM / 60GB Toshiba MK6025 GAS HDD running WinXP SP2.
The HDD specs are interesting: 4200 rpm (201-307 Mbps transfer rate), 8 MB buffer. A bit on the low side, as compared to say, IBM's Travelstar series at 5400 rpm (450 Mbps transfer rate).

The following were the codecs used. The first batch are those present in a standard Win XP system, followed by codecs downloaded from the Internet.

The captures were for done for about 15 seconds as basically I wanted to shortlist the codecs that looked promising.

With WinXP fps
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DV 44
Intel IYUV 35
MS Video 1 59 (only 256 colours - can't use)

Installed
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HuffYUV 2.1.1 29
HuffYUV 2.1.1 53 (with YUV2 option)
HuffYUV 2.2.0 58 (with fastest options) - video can't display - crashes VDub
Lagarith 1.3.9 59 (with Reduced Resolution) - resolution halved - looks bad.

ffdshow (MJPG) 58 (10,000 kbps rate) - anyone else try this?

[jagabo]

The PICvideo MJPEG codec has the option of 4:4:4 (they call it 1:1:1), 4:2:2, and 4:1:1 color subsampling. I don't know how the speed compares to ffdshow's MJPEG encoder. But I see that ffdshow supports fixed quantizer encoding which is what Picvideo's encoder does. Lagarith is too slow for video capture.