A video camera? Not at this stage. Most video cameras, if they have any
digital port, use FireWire, or whatever it is called. I think that this is
the industry and professional standard for video and you must buy a
firewire controller in order to connect.

As for the USB, its throughput is simply not enough. Taking a VHS camera,
that is about 500x250 pixels (250 in every frame, interlaced, gives 500),
in, say, 16-bit colour, at 25 fps, we have 500x250x2x25=6.25 Mb/s. USB is
about 2.5 Mb/s, isn't it? So USB is not an option - UNLESS some gadget,
like Snappy or the Iomega's Buz! (it is for video capture, isn't it?) is
used to compress the video and send it to the computer.

But connecting my VCR to a PC is almost as simple as plugging in a USB
cable... I route it via video and audio inputs of my TV tuner card, a
FlyVideo II, and achieve most reasonable results at 320x240 resolution. Go
higher, and VHS standard starts to show its interlacing due to 100 Hz
refresh rate of my display and only 25 frames per second of the TV.

This is the solution I would recommend if you're about to put some video
on your PC, but buy yourself a lot of hard drive (1-minute video @ 320x240
@ 20 fps is over 150 Mb uncompressed - one hour of filmed video,
consequently, 9 Gb ) and a different TV tuner card - FlyVideo's user
interface is "in a galaxy far, far away" from being perfect.

If you're about to put a lot of video, think about professional video
capture card and, maybe, a hardware MPEG encoder.

Yours,

<> Max Timchenko [MaxVT]
<>
<> [log in to unmask]

On Thu, 6 Jul 2000, Villano, Paul wrote:

> I know about Dazzle and Snappy peripherals to allow you to connect a video
> camera to a PC.  But is there a way to do it through a USB port and software
> only without the Dazzle or Snappy product?  That is, is there any software
> out there that will recognize the attached camera through the USB port and
> import the video without having a go-between appliance (other than the USB
> cable)?

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