1

Technology has come a long way in a few years time. A few years ago I started experimenting with a laptop and a usb webcam.

Today, I'm using a smartphone set up as ip camera and a laptop with usb webcam running NetCam (as ip camera), both transmit wirelessly an MJPEG stream to Kinovea on a Surface tablet. Kinovea delay's the stream, Chrome casts the screen to Chromecast hooked up to a beamer.

The only part that needs to be plugged in to power is the beamer.

A few things that could be improved:

  • 2-3 second delay when casting full screen to chromecast. This could be solved if Kinovea would cast a stream wink

  • Image quality, but that's a lot due to my cheapness: use better camera's. If I would drop Chromecast and hook up the Surface tablet directly to the beamer the image quality would improve a lot. This could also be improved when Kinovea would cast to Chromecast directly.

  • Full screen playback, I know in the latest beta an attempt is made to enlarge the playback screen but a lot of screen area is still not used for video playback resulting in a smaller image on the beamer output.

Overall I ended up (currently, I'm always looking for improvements) with a portable solution which is setup very quick.

2

Hi,
I have not yet tried to serve smartphone camera stream as MJPEG. It is quite relevant to the current effort in the capture module.
What application do you use on the device and what type of framerate/frame size does it achieve ?

3

Hi Joan

I'm using IP Webcam (Android) Free. My S4 Mini can handle 1080p, an older Ace II 720p. Under good lighting both can do 30fps. But when testing in a dimmed living room it drops to 10fps.

It's pretty straight foward once you know the correct URL. Ip webcam: add /video/ wink.

4

Ok, this is officially very cool :-)
I wonder why I never tried that, thank you for the heads up!

Exposure compensation seems to change the gain level. I could not find a setting for exposure duration unfortunately. The auto-exposure is what degrades the framerate in low-light.

It made me realize that the image size should be displayed in Kinovea for these streams, as it's not always given.

5

I'll be looking for an assistent coach to take over basic drill management so I can use all this stuff for individual learning. Give those kids a technical boost and game advantage LOL.

Looks like VLC will support Chromecast in an upcomming release. To bad VLC lag is terrible compared to Kinovea.