How to capture video and compress at same time?

[Shinare]

I have an X10 camera and USB capture device hooked into my computer so I can record the security camera. Unfortunatly, when I use a free capture software I d-loaded its capturing at like 10MB for every second of capture. Thats WAYY WAAAAYY too big. I was hoping to get like a meg a minute or something close to that size. That way I can just loop it weekly.

Is there some software out there that I can use that will give me the 1MB a minute rate that I can capture the video at?:confused:

[Paco103]

I don't know what type of software you're using, but 10MB/sec sounds like raw AVI format. There should be an option somewhere for compression. If not, I know VirtualDub is free <www.virtualdub.org> and it supports capture/compression. I don't think it supports loops though, but atleast you'll be able to capture many hours worth instead of a few minutes. I don't know of anything that supports loop recording, atleast not for free. Sorry. Would be nice if someone knows of something though!

[Shinare]

Wow, what a diference!! I'm now able to record at 640x480 10fps and its only 1.2M a minute using the mplayer9 codec. Not too shabby, I can record a full couple days at that rate. That you so mush for the info.

Yah, a software that would be able to capture and when the filesize gets to a certin point it would loop to the front and start recording over like a tape. I doubt thats possible tho so I'm pretty happy with this one.

Thanks again.

[Paco103]

I know the ATI MultiMediaCenter does it - but it's hardcoded to IT'S video capture devices. It uses it for video on demand, where you can pause live TV and such. You should be able to do it with any form of MPEG compression and some forms of AVI, since they use headers on every packet, rather than one for the whole file. You can just chop off the beginning of the file, and attach to the end (in theory anyway). I'm pretty sure that's what ATI does, but they also use a proprietary file format to do it. The problem comes deleting and writing to different parts of the same file at the same time, probably gets pretty nasty. Anyway, glad the solution works for you, atleast acceptably so.

[causticVapor]

I could write a polling script that would run in the background and check the filesize at a certain interval. Once the file reaches a threshold size, the script simply delets the file. The problem with this is that it's not true loop recording and would probably cause an access violation. Worth trying out though - and if the app records to various temp files, insteaad of writing linearly to one file, then there is some hope.

Wish I knew more about windows and dx programming - then I could write a custom app that would capture and continuously overwrite the file stream. The script I can do now, the program not. Any MCSD's around here?