On Tue, 07 Jul 2009 22:11:12 -0700, Tim Roberts wrote: >>The webcam is bound to do some encoding; most of them use USB "full speed" >>(12Mbit/sec), which isn't enough for raw 640x480x24...@30fps data. > > That's not true. Most of the web cams made in the last 5 years or so run > at high speed, 480 Mbps. Full speed only gets you 1 fps at 640x480 > uncompressed, so it's really only useful for the most primitive video > conference cams.
The very earliest models typically only did 320x200, while later USB-1 webcams used onboard compression to get a decent framerate. For internet use, 12Mbps isn't that much of an obstacle; the internet connection's upload speed is more likely to be the limiting factor. Faster speeds are more useful for things like LAN-based CCTV systems. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list