Video streaming to AVI benchmarks

[davemc]

I need to stream video from 3 firewire cameras (NTSC) to disk for up to 5 minutes. I'm hoping to use the AVI functions in the vision toolkit for LabVIEW and compress to MPEG, but I'm not positive my computer will be able to keep up. Does anyone have any success/failure stories along these lines?

Ideally I'd like to use a PXI controller and maintain 30fps on all 3 cameras but all parameters are negotiable...

[BruceAmmons]

I think you are asking for way more than you will possibly get.  Streaming a single camera to disk for several minutes at 30 fps is a big challenge.  Three cameras is most likely impossible.  The computer won't have enough CPU power to compress three video streams simultaneously, and you can't write to a hard drive fast enough otherwise.

You might want to look into boards that are specifically designed for streaming video to disk.  Perhaps you could put three in the same computer and get lucky.  I still would be concerned about PCI bandwidth and firewire bandwidth, but you might have a chance that way.

Bruce

[davemc]

Thanks Bruce. I think I'm going to either cut my resolution - acquire at 320x240 - or cut my frame rate so the net data rate from the 3 cameras is roughly the same as 1 640x480 30fps signal.

Assuming I pick my hardware right, I don't think I'll have a problem acquiring at roughly 18 MB/s.