[MPlayer-users] My cropping question revisited.

[Reimar Döffinger]

Gene Heskett <gheskett at wdtv.com> wrote:
>On Thursday 26 September 2013 16:53:52 Reimar Döffinger did opine:
>

>> Tells me the camera can do yuv, h.264 and mjpeg.
>
>And those formats are exactly the ones that return a black screen.  I 
>thought it odd that no format of yuv or mjpeg worked. 

That might cause you trouble...

> .  What other names might h.264 be
>known 
>as to a library built in 2010?  Or is that too new for that time frame?

Well, the proper name is MPEG-4 AVC.

>> Which one is best depends on the ratio USB bandwidth/cpu power
>> available. I also have to admit I don't know how to tell MPlayer
>which
>> one to select.
>
>Obviously neither do I...  CPU power available is likely a problem
>since 
>this portion of the software runs on a single core of the dual core an
>atom 
>has, at 1.6ghz IIRC.  IOW, it does everything but actually drive the 
>hardware.

No chance of decoding H.264 at that resolution on it. Doing it on both cores would be pushing it.
If you're lucky, this model has a hardware decoder, then you could use that.
But in that case you basically can't do any post-processing (cropping would be one of the few still to work, via MPlayer's pan-scan), even overlays might be problematic (you'd need the overlays to be composited by the windowing system, not directly rendered onto the video).
I suspect that the MJPEG is the most realistic to get working...