Jeez Kibby. I'm not an MPEG-1 guru but I certainly know DV basics :) Thanks for letting me know MPEG is for Moving Pictures compression :)
I'll take your word that it looks great and will send off the http to the guy that does telemedicine video. My key concerns were (1) sustained bandwidth over parallel port, esp. since this is problem even when using bus-mastering PCI cards, and (2) artifacts from the heavy compression. As you know, high motion video, not just talking heads, is a real bear to handle through inter-frame compression. NewMedia, for example, has done a number of articles showing degradation in picture quality with various compression ratios ... not just JPEG but a variety of other codecs like Intel's IVI which does bi-directional wavelet style compression. Yes, you can encode at 200:1 but quality is an issue. At 3 Mps that you cite, you are down to something like 70:1 compression. The Videonics product says it operates at 200:1 but as David pointed out with his reference, that can mean a number of things. In any case, I stand corrected about peak parallel port bandwidth though I am still curious about sustained throughput. I've played with preview mode on the Snappy through parallel port and they have tiny tiny thumbnail slow fps previews. If they could count on 3 Mps, they should have had better preview mode even without MPEG-like compression ratios.
-Bill |
