Video recording problem

J dreadpiratejeff at gmail.com
Fri Jul 22 16:22:49 UTC 2011


On Fri, Jul 22, 2011 at 11:33,  <p.echols at comcast.net> wrote:
> Greetings all:
>
> I am attempting to record video from a webcam on my laptop.  The laptop is an Asus "netbook" Eee PC 1005PEB with 2GB memory, running ubuntu 10.4  The webcam I am attempting to use is a logitech QuicCam Pro.
>
> What happens is that, when I start Cheese, the application displays smooth video on screen.  When recording, the video becomes very jerky and will hang badly.  It is as if watching a slide show with freeze frames for several seconds, short snips of motion, followed by more freeze frames.
>
> When searching for help with this problem, the sites I have found are discussing playback issues. By playing the webcam video on my desktop I am able to confirm that this is a recording issue on the laptop, not playback.
>
> If it matters, I do have playback issues, both on this laptop and my desktop when playing HD video, but the desktop at least is able to play video properly using xine.
>
> Does anyone have experience with recording video on this or a similar netbook?  Any thoughts on how I might troubleshoot? I have a project coming up that needs to use an external cam, not the builtin.  (Ok, I don't have it working either, but I have not done the homework to feel like a query to the list is justified.)

My guess is that is just the result of trying to record/encode/write
video on a system running a pretty lightweight processor. Even with
2GB of RAM, I have a feeling you're just overloading the processor and
your video issues are due to that.  I had the same issues (and still
do) on my Lenovo S10 running a slightly older Atom processor than
yours.  I bet if you tried the same camera on a laptop with a core i3,
i5 or i7 you'd see much different results.

You also didn't mention if you were recording in HD or not.  If you
are, try dropping the resolution down to something lower and see if
that improves the situation.

Cheers
Jeff




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