LabVIEW 7.1 Compatible Camcorders

[Greg Rupp]

Hello NI Community, I need some help in picking out a camcorder that works well with labview (with NI Vision). The primary application is to extract boundry lines from a track and determine obstacles on the track. If anyone has used a camcorder with LabVIEW I would like to know what they thought?

[Scott_R]

Greg,

When you say camcorder, are you referring to a commercial camera? For the most part, the NI software/hardware is designed for use with industrial cameras. However, if the camera has a firewire connection and is DCAM compliant, then it would work with our IMAQ for IEEE 1394 drivers. Also, if it has a BNC video output, then you may be able to make use of one of our analog framegrabber boards. We also have boards available to acquire images from digital video cameras.

Have you taken a look at the Industrial Camera Advisor page? This resource is located at www.ni.com/cameras. You can look up information on the cameras that NI has tested and approved as well as others that should function well with our image acquisition boards and software.

Take a look
at that webpage and let me know if you have any additional questions on this issue.

Regards,
Scott R.
Applications Engineer
National Instruments

[Irene He]

Hi,
Is your camcorder DV cam (which most camcorders on the market now are DV camcorders)? If so, I doubt IMAQ 1394 driver can acquire image from it, because a DV cam output DV encoded data rather than raw video data. One of the option is using IVision LabVIEW toolkit, it's DirectShow based, so it'll work with DV camcorder as well as USB webcams, IEEE1394/firewire camera and TV tuner.
Here is the link, you can get an evaluation version to try out.
http://www.hytekautomation.com/Products/IVision.html

Hope you find it useful.
Thank you.
Irene