HD Pal BNC Camera to USB

[FatManJim]

Hi

Need a little help if anyone can assist

I’m working on a little project where I need to convert a HD Pal Camera with a BNC or RCA (with adapter) over to USB so it will plug into a PC.

Any help if there anything on the market that would allow me to do this?

Thanks in advance

Jim

[LordLoveLength]

HD PAL?
Is it analogue 576i PAL you need to capture or 720/1080 HD SDI?
Getting any form of decent resolution over USB will need USB3 unless you are using some form of compression. What is your proposed source?

[Lucid_AV]

FatManJim said:

Hi

Need a little help if anyone can assist

I’m working on a little project where I need to convert a HD Pal Camera with a BNC or RCA (with adapter) over to USB so it will plug into a PC.

Any help if there anything on the market that would allow me to do this?

Thanks in advance

Jim

I'm going to presume that your HD PAL camera is an analogue CCTV camera. The reason for that is consumer-grade HD camcorders don't use a single BNC for the 720p/1080i/p output. That would mean using HD-SDI as the video interface, and there just isn't widespread support for that when HDMI and FireWire and the faster versions of USB exist.

You've got yourself an analogue HD CCTV cam then, and now you'd like to get the video stream in to a computer. First, you need to decide which of the HD formats you'll use. Depending on the camera, you'll have a choice of HD-CVI, HD-TVI and HD-AHD. Of the three, HD-CVI is less widely supported, so I'd put that at the bottom of the list to investigate.

My recommendation is you start with HD-AHD. There are HD-AHD to USB 3.0 convertors. I have no idea if he cheaper ones such as the £90 Linligoing are any good, so you'll have to do your own homework on that. What sucks with these is you'll need a free USB 3.0 port on the PC, but more than that, if you want to expand the number of cameras then you'll need one of these convertors for each. That makes it expensive.

Personally, I would ditch the analogue HD CCTV cam and go IP cam instead. You'll be able to live stream within your own home network directly from the camera via any device that can load a web browser. Add a bit of software on your PC to turn it in to a multichannel IP CCTV recorder (NVR). If I were doing this, I'd buy the Blue Iris software (£70) as it's a tried and tested solution. There are bits of software free to download that will do this too, but I don't know if they come with any catches or security risks. Have a look at http://webcamscreencapture.com/how-to-capture-vide... or Google around the topic.

Selling the analogue CCTV cam might feel like a big step, but I think it'll make the whole process much simpler and possibly cheaper in the long run. Expanding the number of cameras wouldn't involve any additional hardware or convertors other than an extra camera and a power supply. Of course there's always the concern about the cost of a new camera, that's only natural, but if you know the right person to talk to ( ) then you could get a Full-HD colour IP cam with starlight night vision from a major brand for just a few tens of Pounds.

Edited by Lucid_AV on Wednesday 1st September 23:43