Advice on capturing a USB camera feed

[Wombat]

Hey all,
My first post in DV, so apologies if I missed a post that would have helped me.

We're trying to set up this cheap little USB camera at work - we have a product in engineering that fails overnight, and we need video of what happens to it.

The software that came with the camera is okay, but not too elaborate. The camera captures at 320x200 uncompressed (it does Intel 420 compression, but that drops a ton of frames). That means we'll hit the 4GB file size limit long before the overnight test finishes.

I'm trying to do it with virtual dub instead. Any advice?

Machine is a W2K box with about 40GB of IDE space free, 1.8GHz HT Xeon, and 1GB of RAM.

[junkmalle]

I'm not sure exactly what your requirements are but you can capture at 320x240 with the Divx or Xvid codecs at 15 fps and maybe 500 kbps CBR and still have good quality. Without audio that should easily let you capture all night without exceeding 4GB.

I find I have to use the "compatibility" mode to capture. Otherwise I can't view the resulting files. If you capture in compatibility mode be sure to set your codec with the compatiblity mode too.

VirtualDub's capture settings are difficult to set. You have to go through so many menu choices to get all the settings:

File -> Capture AVI to go to capture mode.

File -> Set Capture File to tell it where to put the file.

Capture -> Settings to disable audio, set the frame rate, stop conditions.

Video -> (device name at bottom) to select capture device.

Video -> Video Format to select the frame size, color format etc.

Video -> Compression (compatibility) to select the compression codec.

Audio -> Compression to select audio format and compression codec.

Capture -> Preferences to save the audio and video settings so you don't have to do all this every time!

Capture -> Capture Video (compatibility mode) to capture.

[Wombat]

Got virtualdub working, but it's too easy to stop capture. Ended up getting a program called "watcher," whose most important feature is that it has motion-activated recording.

[cuddles]

Have you got a URL for "Watcher" it sounds interesting?

[junkmalle]

Originally posted by Wombat
Got virtualdub working, but it's too easy to stop capture.

Their choice to make Left Moust Click one of the defaults events to stop recording is stupid. You can change that on the Capture -> Settings dialog.

Originally posted by Wombat
Ended up getting a program called "watcher," whose most important feature is that it has motion-activated recording.

I almost suggested you look for software that does that but didn't have any specific recommendations or links. And I wasn't sure your "product failure" was something that could be captured that way.