One-Click WebCam Recording!

**VegasGuy** · 07-31-2012, 01:42 PM

Originally Posted by duncanator24

Why doesn't the software work? Like what makes this camera any different from a standard one? I had thought any USB camera could be captured with any software that records webcams. If it can stream, then it can be captured is how I thought it worked. Because if anything, the PC software could just record everything on the screen and therefore record the video playing from the camera. Would that work?

The issue is making use of the H.264 video encoding that's built in to the camera. Very few USB webcams have that. And it takes a special driver and software on the PC side to access it. The C920 works exactly like any other webcam in all other use cases beside this one. You can record full HD 1080p video at 30fps using the video codec of your choice, but your processor usage will be VERY high. Most Atom boards may struggle to maintain the framerate. That's where the onboard H.264 comes in. It handles all that encoding on the camera itself, so the PC just has to save the data to disk (more or less). Like I said, the only application that I know of for Windows XP/7 that makes use of the H.264 encoding is Skype. And even though Windows 8 supports that by default via the UVC specification, that capability is not yet fully implemented.

VegasGuy

**grahamjw** · 08-09-2012, 11:33 PM

Originally Posted by grahamjw

Has anyone found a working solution for recording with GPS data overlay in real-time that works for 64-bit Windows 7?

I ended up going back to linux anyway.

I can parse the output of gpspipe for the data, then use that as the source for a series of marquees in VLC which get transcoded along with the video feed. Alternatively I can also create a single png image of the data with imagemagick to be overlaid as a logo in the VLC stream (which looks a bit prettier). Either way the updates are sent to VLC's remote TCP remote control interface using netcat.

I used to run Windows (32-bit) for OziExplorer and better voices like AT&T Natural Voices, but I've now got all that running under wine.

EDIT: Here's a proof of concept example. The speed is wrong in this one (converted to km/h from knots instead of m/sec).

**Maheriano** · 09-16-2012, 05:47 PM

I haven't checked into this thread in a long time but I just bought and installed a Microsoft HD-3000 camera in my car and it works great with Capture! except I get errors every time it starts that I should check the config.ini settings because an array index is out of bounds. I didn't change any of the settings in the file, I just downloaded Capture! and installed it, that was it. It picked up my camera, I modified some of the settings inside the application and it records great. I also get all kinds of other exceptions any time I try to use any of the features like GPS overlay or anything else like that, they're COM or .NET exceptions.
When I start the program, the exact error is:

Error while setting up the capture compressor.
Check your config.ini.
Array index out of bounds.

Should I be getting these?

**Maheriano** · 09-18-2012, 01:57 PM

Where do I get support for this application?

**Toxic0n** · 09-24-2012, 01:23 PM

What codecs is everyone using? I have an Atom CPU 1.6Ghz and currently using uncompressed video. The CPU usage is already at 80%. I tried using one of the xvid codecs and my video was all scrambled.

**Mickz** · 09-24-2012, 05:27 PM

Originally Posted by Toxic0n

What codecs is everyone using? I have an Atom CPU 1.6Ghz and currently using uncompressed video. The CPU usage is already at 80%. I tried using one of the xvid codecs and my video was all scrambled.

I think some are mentioned on page 100. Work perfectly with MiniCam recording SW.

You may have to drop resolution and quality on a low power system as HD recording (as you noted above) can be the most CPU intensive function you can run on a Car PC.