Firewire webcam.... Need advice.

[alexruiz]

Guys, I need help here. To stay in touch with my relatives, we use webcam, video conferencing. Both parties are in dial up (56 k). We found however, that the webcam quality is a huge factor of how the other party looks. We use an iomagic true vga 640x480 (cheap, but with proper light it works wonders). They have a crappy IBM xirlink 352x240 that looks like garbage..... And we always look way better than them

I know that 56k would compress the image a lot over the internet, but because USb webcams already compress the image, you get compresion of compression and the final result looks nasty.

In addition, my wife takes a lot of snapshots with the webcam, so the superior image quality of a firewire webcam would really please her.

Has anyone here used a firewire webcam?? If so, how would you compare it to even a top of the line USB webcam??? Would you recommend any brand/model???

Thanks

 

[alexruiz]

By the way, I forgot to ask if I can use a DV camcorder as webcam.

Thanks again

 

[IgorTs]

You don't get 56 for upload, 33.6 max. For video you should use broadband

 

[Packy]

I'm not sure how many webcam software packages would support a firewire connection (unless it was software that came with a firewire webcam). In other words, I don't know if you could use a DV camera as a webcam through a firewire port if you couldn't locate software that handles it. Most webcams and video capture devices go through Video For Windows (VFW) drivers. There is a lot of freeware webcam software available though, and with firewire cameras growing in popularity it wouldn't surprise me if you could find shareware or freeware firewire webcam software to allow using a DV cam.

Not much help I know, but good luck

 

[jyrgen]

I have also looked for software that would help to use firewire cam as a webcam, and haven't found any. As Packy previously stated, most (if not all) webcam software uses VfW drivers, but Microsoft wrote only WDM (Windows Driver Model?) drivers for firewire connections, and probably does not plan to write the VfW ones. So somebody should come up with webcam software, that could use WDM firewire drivers. It's kind of strange, that with DV-cams and firewire connections being so increasingly popular, nobody hasn't done it yet.

Of course you can use analog output of the dv-cam and capture the analog video through video-in or TV-card, but that seems like complete waste while we have such superb connection as firewire available.

 

[Trashman]

here's the fix for XP only, added DV support........Link....if your not runnin XP you probably would have to use a video capture card.