Pandora's Performance With Webcams


Elanzer

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Would the Pandora have enough hardware power to record from a webcam at 640x480 30fps, with audio?

One of the things I want to do with my Pandora is use it as a video recording device while I'm riding my motorcycle, basically putting the pandora in my motorcycle tankbag while wiring a camera up to record a ride, but it's important that it records at 30fps - otherwise it's too choppy for fast rides to be worth using.
 
Almost definitely.

You should look into getting as nice of a cam as you can though, crappy cams tend to smear when fast motion is in the frame. The PS3 cam would probably be a good candidate. It also has a microphone array that helps with noise cancellation (if you could find any software that supported it specifically.)

It might use a bit of power to do this so you might want to rig up a power supply connected to your motorcycle, but I bet it can easily handle the video (especially if you stream directly to a file without recompressing, but that might be large - basically you may have to compromise a bit on the compression (probably can't go directly to h.264)).

This is all speculation though.

Having said that, I'm planning on doing this in my car as well. Along with many other pandora-related car adventures.
 
Elanzer said:
Would the Pandora have enough hardware power to record from a webcam at 640x480 30fps, with audio?

One of the things I want to do with my Pandora is use it as a video recording device while I'm riding my motorcycle, basically putting the pandora in my motorcycle tankbag while wiring a camera up to record a ride, but it's important that it records at 30fps - otherwise it's too choppy for fast rides to be worth using.

What kinda bike do you ride? :D

Thought about a Helmet Cam?
 
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kingoddball said:
Elanzer said:
Would the Pandora have enough hardware power to record from a webcam at 640x480 30fps, with audio?

One of the things I want to do with my Pandora is use it as a video recording device while I'm riding my motorcycle, basically putting the pandora in my motorcycle tankbag while wiring a camera up to record a ride, but it's important that it records at 30fps - otherwise it's too choppy for fast rides to be worth using.

What kinda bike do you ride? :D

Thought about a Helmet Cam?

Nothing fancy, just a 2007 Kawasaki Ninja 250R. ~95MPH top speed is fast enough for me; never ended up going to a bigger bike.

I was looking at helmet cams but they don't seem to have all the flexibility I want. I want to be able to put the camera on the inside of my helmet so I can shield it from wind and talk while recording, or use a BT headset to record audio while using the camera as video only somewhere on the bike.
 
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Elanzer said:
kingoddball said:
Thought about a Helmet Cam?

I was looking at helmet cams but they don't seem to have all the flexibility I want. I want to be able to put the camera on the inside of my helmet so I can shield it from wind and talk while recording, or use a BT headset to record audio while using the camera as video only somewhere on the bike.
You could always use a mic with a helmet cam, couldn't you?
 
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rabidpoobear said:
You could always use a mic with a helmet cam, couldn't you?

I could but, then I would be using 2 different recording devices and the audio would be a pain to sync up wouldn't it? I don't know of any helmet cams that have BT for mic or have a mic jack.
 
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Web cams always seem blurry and sh!t....

GO THE GREEN MACHINE! I have a ZX6R (metallic light blue)....
 
The answer is: definitely. I can do this easily with my Beagleboard and Touchbook so no problems doing this at all, I imagine.
 
Elanzer said:
rabidpoobear said:
You could always use a mic with a helmet cam, couldn't you?

I could but, then I would be using 2 different recording devices and the audio would be a pain to sync up wouldn't it?
Well, you can just clap your hands together before every video. This creates a spike in the audio that is very easy to sync with the video. But yeah it would be a bit of a pain.
But you could just hack open the helmet cam, and desolder their mic, then bring it out on a cable into your headset. or even better, you could just remove their mic altogether and make an input port for it and route a really nice boom headset mic or something like that.

I mean if you can get a webcam that can get 30fps that don't look like CRAP then that might be a good way to go. but that helmet cam doesn't look too bad either.
 
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I plan to do one better than this.

With a webcam, pandora, and my HSDPA cell phone, I was going to broadcast a webcam whilst mobile and walking around / driving, and maybe put it on chat roulette or something. =3
 
Kaze0110 said:
and maybe put it on chat roulette or something. =3
Doesn't that use Flash, though?

I've only heard of it on that drunk texts website, but since it sounds popular, I assume it uses Flash.
 
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