On 27 May 2006, at 7:32 AM, Thomas Ouellet Fredericks wrote:

In your experience, what is the best setup for the least camera lag? I tried DV in XP and the lag seems to be more than 20 ms. Webcams are terrible. Anyone tried video input pci cards? For Linux or XP?

I had been dealing with the same problem - DV via firewire has the
big time lag with any software.

I switched from a MacMini to a Linux system with a PCI video card and
I can get 4 streams simultaneously, and can switch each stream
between 4 different inputs - and the lag time is very small (I have
cameras onstage, with shots of performers speaking on a screen behind
them, so the lag has to be small so their lips aren't way out of sync).

I use a Eurosys Tetra card - not cheap but it is supported properly
by the v4l drivers. My OS is Debian (Kannotix). It was my first foray
into linux, that combination worked well for me though the learning
curve was steep.

simon