Heres a quick run down of what I want to do for work purposes. We have been looking for a video conference set up through a PC on the cheap. So far we have tried the latest and greatest webcam; a high end older sony conference camera that was designed for IP based video conferencing. The camera only has component video on it so we purchased component to USB from belkin. The quality is OK but nothing special. So now I’m on to using a cam corder. Right now I have a Sony HDR-HD7 1080p camera. I hooked up the belkin device to it just to see if we could pull video from it and it works. The quality was much better than the stand alone sony conference camera. However still not good enough (for my boss.) So my thoughts were either to move to fire wire and use the software called DV Driver; or (depending on cost) purchase a card that captures composite or HDMI video. The only problem with the DV camera is that it does not have a firewire cable on it. So I would have to purchase a firewire card plus a new DV Cam Corder From reading around it all appears that the best route is to go with a DV cam corder and using it as a “webcam.”
Thanks for the input