Flashing Philips Webcams

[Avocette]

Another slippery slope.... After some modest success in photographing the Moon and Jupiter with my DSLR using Prime Focus and Eyepiece projection respectively, I'm about to embark on Webcam imaging. I have a Philips Toucam Pro (740k) and have successfully installed drivers under Windows 7 to use it directly with my laptop and SharpCam. Should I assume that the performance I obtain would not be improved upon by flashing the webcam to become a 900NC clone? I've read in one posting that there could be an advantage in using the extra 'codec YUY2' that then becomes usable. Can someone explain a bit more please?

[JamesF]

There may be, depending on what you already have available.

YUY2, IYUV, I420 etc. refer to the way in which the data for a single video frame is arranged (and potentially compressed).  It's quite common for video data to be stored not as RGB values, but as chrominance and luminance data.  Because luminance is much more important visually than chrominance often the chrominance is compressed more (using lossy compression) to reduce the file size without losing luminance data.  Even when the same amount of chrominance data is present in two different formats, some may compress better overall than others giving smaller file sizes for exactly the same data (there are effectively two forms of compression happening -- one within each frame and one across the entire frame, or even a sequence of frames).

If the codecs you already have are no more lossy than YUY2 then not having YUY2 may be no big deal.  You might just end up with slightly larger output files.

James

[Guest]

Hi,

As James has said you will end up with larger output files, but it is worth flashing the Toucam, and is very easy to do, but you have to do it on a windowsXP based PC for it to work.

MM

[sloz1664]

Check the following link for flashing your Toucam.

http://www.astronomyshed.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=2724

cheers

Steve

[Avocette]

Many thanks everyone. I have a desktop PC still running XP so I can use that to do the flashing, and the weather here is atrocious so no unhealthy rush to complete it in a hurry!