What does it take to get a webcam to go faster?

[ingeborgdot@yah]

I have a semi fast speed of 3.0 and a pretty fast computer. Is ther any way to make your webcam go a little faster instead of frame by frame. I have a pretty nice webcam.

[Real-tiner]

Possibilities:

1. A higher speed connection.

If you have standard dial-up, it's going to go frame-by-frame. The data can't go out fast enough to do anything except frame by frame.

A 640 X 480 24-bit color frame contains 7372800 bits. At 56Kbaud, it will take 164.5 seconds (2 minutes 41.5 seconds) to transmit one frame (including the modem synchronizing bits).

2. Lower resolution.

Leaving out every other pixel both vertically and horizontally divides the size of each frame by 4, making transmission of the 1843200 bits take only 1/4 of the time.

3. Monochrome.

Sending the picture in grayscale instead of color reduces the size to 2457600 bits, and the time to 1/3 of that taken with color.

4. Reduced color set.

Using 256 colors also reduces the size to 2457600 bits and the time to 1/3 of that taken with 24-bit color.

5. Intermittent capture.

Instead of capturing one frame every 164.5 seconds, capture a 20 second segment every so often, and transmit it over a longer period. The receiving person then can reconstitute it at the faster speed by downloading, then playing.

6. Data compression.

Using data compressing techniques (such as mpeg) allows the subsequent frames to send only the data needed for the changing parts of the picture.

[ingeborgdot@yah]

I have 3008kbps which is pretty fast. I could probably do some of the other things but that takes some of the fun out of it.

[chrisbliss18]

Is 3mbps your downspeed? If so, what is your upspeed?

Furthermore, are you sure that your connection speed is the limiting factor? What about the people that are viewing your cam? What are their connection speeds?

Are you multicasting or do you have to run a connection for each viewer?

[ingeborgdot@yah]

1500kbps down up? My up is around 512 kbps.

[sashaxxx]

thank u thank u thank u soooo much Real-tiner for the advice, my webcam was running slow but with ur advice, i just made some adjustment and now is better.