Composite video input

[pdumais]

Hi,

I am currently looking for a way to capture video input from a camera that I already have. The camera has a composite output. I then want to stream the video over an IP network. So I am guessing that I would need a USB video capture device. I found lots of website that talks about this and it seems that it is very hard to find a capture device that will work on the rpi.

But my question is more about the encoding part. I see that several people say that I would need a capture card with hardware h.264 encoding because the rpi will not be powerful enough to do it. But I am only looking at streaming grayscale 5fps 640x480. So do I really need to spend the extra bucks to get a capture card to encode? or the rpi will be plenty capable of doing this?

[Spid]

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewt ... =38&t=7748

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewt ... 44&t=16044

http://raspberrypi.org/phpBB3//viewtopi ... 50&t=18690

EasyCap USB http://www.amazon.co.uk/EasyCAP-Video-A ... B0011N9QNC

[pdumais]

Thanks but like I said, I already found lots website that talks about what input device to use. So I don't need information on this. And also, people are having all sorts of problems with the easycap so I don't wanna go that route.


What I really wanted to know was: when looking for another device, do I really need to get a device that will do h.264 encoding considering the low FPS and resolution that I will be using?

[Mesozoic]

First off, the device you need is a video decoder, not an encoder. You are attempting to decode an NTSC signal to a digital buffer and then encoding it to some format, then streaming it over the net. I believe the Broadcom chip has enough GPU in it to encode H.264 in realtime, so that portion of the problem shouldn't be an issue at 640x480. The main issue is how do you feed the RPi the NTSC signal.

[ghans]

As Mesozoic points out , the problem is not encoding video.
It's getting analog video into the Pi.
(The situation is not different for digital video IIRC).
Look at motion or mjpeg-streamer - you can easily achieve
what you want IF you succeed getting the video into the Pi.

ghans