Web Cams - Technical Questions

jake dog · #1 04-27-2005, 10:59 PM

I have noticed that some web cam videos seem like slide shows, other smove smoothly but are poor quality and some are almost as sharp as regular movies.

I am pretty knowledgable about computers in general, but have no experience with cams. Can anyone tell me what determines the level of quality of a web cam clip? Is it the resolution capabilites , such as frames per second, of the camera itself, the video card or CPU of the host computer, the video card or CPU of the receiving (recording) computer, some combination of all these, or none of the above?

Thanks in advance for any help.

**Wetmac** · #2 04-28-2005, 09:57 AM

I'm not sure of the exact reason but my guess its the connection speed of the people doing the cam. If your camming with someone on dial up you can only record what they upload and with dial up it would be a bit stop/start.

aniporn · #3 04-28-2005, 01:44 PM

As someone who considers it his hobby to get naked women on cam I will say this.

Biggest factor, the program you are using to chat. Dont get me wrong, the persons connections speed and cam its self makes a difference but the big thing is the program. The most popular IM programs I find are Yahoo, MSN, and to a lesser extent AIM. I noticed that MSN has great quality for the cam because its so smooth and almost looks like video when you are recording it, but the bad thing about it is that saving the video usualy means having to get some program to record a certan area of the screen. This means there is usualy a border around it or it dosent look clean (and if it isnt clean you can reboadcast it pretending your the person,lol). Yahoo on the other hand has somthing called super webcam, Yahoo's usual cam looks like a slideshow, its kinda jerky and depending how the other person has it set up it can be very clear or very shitty, but super cam is very smooth and looks as good as MSN video. The good thing about it though is that yahoo cams are extemly easy to capture, I use camgrab and it can save the session as a seres of pics or a avi or mpg file, and when you capture the cam it just takes the video area so reboardcasting is easy. I hear AIM is good too but I never used it.