Hi Neil, It's not really clear from your mail .. If you are looking at an analog camera: You would first need a digital video decoder to interface that signal to a CPU, which can eventually send it to an encoder or stream it elsewhere. Additionally, you need to check whether your CPU is able to handle the memory bandwidth required to handle the stream. You did not mention what interface you were looking at, so generally, Some video decoders that you can look at: http://www.sacg.com.tw/sacweb/marcom/epaper/images/SAA7136_Sep04.pdf https://www.akm.com/akm/en/file/datasheet/AK8854VQ.pdf http://www.ti.com/pdfs/vf/vidimg/tvp5150_pb.pdf https://www.maximintegrated.com/en/products/analog/video-products/MAX9526.h= tml https://www.intersil.com/en/products/audiovideo/video-decoders-encoders/vid= eo-decoders/TW9960.html These are some of the standard decoders that comes to my mind. There are of course quite more of them. The bitstream rate needs to be calculated from the video decoder output format. The decoders do allow you set different formats with them. Eventually, you quickly realize that you need to write a driver for these video decoders. Of course, I 'am fairly certain that quite a large number of the ARM microcontrollers can handle them. If you have a digital camera module, some mid range ARM microcntrollers they have DCMI, MIPI interfaces to which you can connect the camera directly to. Cheers, Manu On Thu, Mar 8, 2018 at 7:52 AM, Neil wrote: > I want to record video of at least 1.0MP to SSD (or other memory) for > about 3-5 minutes. 15FPS is fine. But I really want to avoid SBCs > because of the OS (and more specifically the boot time), so wondering > what it would take to do this with a microcontroller. > I'm looking at camera modules similar to this... > https://www.aliexpress.com/item/600TVL-1-4-1-8mm-CMOS-FPV-170-Degree-Wide= -Angle-Lens-Camera-PAL-NTSC-image/32570417705.html > > I believe (haven't yet found a clear answer) that these cameras do 24 > bpp (Is this correct?), and if so I'd need 1 MP x 3 bytes x 60 secs x 5 > mins =3D 900 MB to store raw data. > That's no prob with an SD card, but I expect bandwidth will be an issue, > so I'd need to compress it. This is where I draw a blank... what does > it take to compress video? > > I'm clueless on video, so wondering if a microcontroller (say PIC32 or > ARM) would be able to accept TTL NTSC video at this rate and compress > it, and then store it. Or is there a specialized processor I can use to > accept the NTSC video stream and store it to SD? > Should I use some other protocol other than NTSC for this perhaps? > > Cheers, > -Neil. > > -- > http://www.piclist.com/techref/piclist PIC/SX FAQ & list archive > View/change your membership options at > http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist --=20 http://www.piclist.com/techref/piclist PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist .