[TriLUG] Advice on video capture devices

[Rodney Radford]

Hi,

I have been attending TriLUG for a few years now on a fairly sporadic basis, and have been a lurker on the TriLUG mail list, but I guess it is time to finally say hello - and, of course, ask for help...

My interest over the past two years with Linux is as an embedded platform - both at home in my hobbies and in my job (Tekelec).  My current project, however, requires video capture and I have googled for some answers, but keep hitting the same dead-end each time.

The preferred hardware platform would be a PC/104 board (or the higher cost PC/104+ board) as space and power is limited. The application will be as a control  system for a robot (see the K3A robot under products at www.cybermotion.com for a picture of the robot). The turret at the top of the robot already has a pan/tilt video camera that I need to use (which rules out using a simple webcam). 

I think the simplest approach would be a USB based video capture device - does anyone have any first-hand knowledge of using one of these under Linux? Alternatively, do you know of any good online resources I could check?

Backup approaches would be to use a direct PC/104 or PC/104+ video capture system - does anyone have any experience with this?

Thanx,
Rodney

PS: Assume the latest 2.6.x kernel for the project as this will be a hand-rolled embedded system booting off a compact flash.