[MPlayer-users] Digital camcoder

[D Richard Felker III]

On Fri, Nov 28, 2003 at 05:36:05PM +0100, Grzegorz Borowiak wrote:
> [Automatic answer: RTFM (read DOCS, FAQ), also read DOCS/bugreports.html]
> Ehlo!
> 
> I'm about to buy a digital camcoder. I consider mainly Sony's products (I
> need their night shot feature). Is this possible to connect camcoder to PC
> and run mencoder in such way that it would perform on-the-fly encoding
> what camera sends through USB? Or should I pull the whole uncompressed
> movie through USB to disk and then encode?
> 
> Maybe somebody here has some experience with camcoders (esp. Sony's)?

If you intend to use a dv camera in conjunction with computers, be
ABSOLUTELY SURE to get a PAL model with progressive mode. I expect
you'll already be getting PAL anyway since that's the standard in
Europe, but you should be aware that NTSC DV is unusably bad (horrible
quality loss when converting to/from mpeg/divx). Dealing with
interlaced video really sucks too, so you want a progressive camera.

As for on-the-fly use, it should be possible, but it goes over
firewire, not usb (usb is way too slow, I would expect).

Rich