1394 vs composite w/ 5 cams @ 5 fps

[brenden]

We're building a surveillance system w/ 5 cameras capturing 5fps each.

We're considering using 1394 cams like the Fire-I, apple isight, or irez.com versus a system using traditional CCTV cams running into an 8 port capture card/s, like the spectra/8, LML, or equiv built on bt878 chipset.

One goal is 5fps recording at all times. We need final output to be as jpeg images stored in directory hierarchies. (We'll use ffmpeg to assemble 5-minute movie segments that can be downloaded and watched -- we don't need traditional "streaming" mpeg4 or similar.)

We will probably add motion detection/recording + alarm later. We also want to allow web viewing with 1 second refresh.

Would anyone offer experience or advice on going the CCTV route vs. the firewire route? We've already pretty much given up on trying to do it in the minefield of USB2.

[jameswilson]

with composite you are limited by the format pal/ntsc for you max res. I think you said in a prev post you didnt want to use ip, but ip would give you upto 8megapixels if you could build a powerfull enough server.

I use composite cameras but thats my background so i would woudnt I.
Advatage of composite cctv cams is they are designed for the job, I know the IP lot are catching up but there not there yet (low light performance, backlight comp, peak white inversion, nuberplate capture etc etc.)

[zoneminder]

I've never actually come acrfoss any firewire cameras so the first thing you will need to check is if they are supported in Linux at all. Assuming they are and if the drivers present them in a similar way to video or usb cameras then there should be no problem. However those are two quite big ifs that you will need to check out first.

Phil

[brenden]

the isight comes up as /dev/video1394/0

got an app called 'spook' to stream from it onto a mac via quicktime

and managed to pull one jpeg frame off it

but nothing else

i'm having trouble getting latest zm to compile on an amd64

[jashmenn]

I also can get isight to come up under /dev/video1394/0 . While I have got it to work with coriander (http://damien.douxchamps.net/ieee1394/c ... /index.php) I have not yet got it to work with ZoneMinder. Has any body made any progress with this?

[jashmenn]

fyi, iSight does work on Linux, (im using slackware 10.1). I've got it to work with ZoneMinder via coriander's v4l export. One issue I havn't yet solved is how to disable the isight's auto-shutoff. It seems if there are no events for a while the screen just turns black and you have to restart the camera...

[tdog]

I have been able to get the isight to work with coriander but not with the v4l support.

with coriander, when you turn on v4l do you have to tell zoneminder to look to /dev/video0 ?

I have tried /dev/video0 /dev/raw1394 /dev/video1394/0 but nothing seems to stream through to the web interface. I'm sure I must have set something incorrectly in the configuration. any pointers on how to trouble shoot this?

[coke]

I've got a sony ...-sfx9000 firewire camera. Could have a lot of them cheap, and would love to make use of them. Has the situation improved? Can firewire video be made to work? I found a post somewhere with instructions on how to stream it, but I wanted to watch it, an I couldn't determine where it was streaming to.

it pops up with the model number & brand in coriander, but all I can get is green. If I hit receive, the light on the camera starts looking busy, and I get some sort of packet count. Sounds good. I hit display (or whichever is the button just to the right of receive that is the same concept) it brings up a big window (full-screen) of just green.

I know the camera works, we plugged into someone's mac, and ichat (or something) said "hey, here's this camera with this brand", and proceeded to show video (once we got the lens focused)

[tszodie]

Hey coke and all. Like mentioned above coriander for 1394 camz I'm currently investigating kino for dv camcorders.. My hope is to get them A on the ZM box under V4L and B as an IP stream from various other boxes Win & Lin

My neighbor runs a racing boat film production biz and hes got a ton o sony handycams that have been replaced due to abuse and drownings. I can fix most of em so thats why the new revival for me to see if a can get camcorders on ZM. This would be so enterprise lol

here is a bit on the neighbor if anyone is bored
NWT Extreme productions
http://www.nzjetboating.com/mpeg.html
http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=IMlw9bcvsFI