Greetings all, and well met.

I have a project coming up for work that I would like to get some ideas for.

We are a television station. We have a remote camera located downtown. This camera has a microwave link back to the station that feeds us live video from the camera.

I have been asked to take the video from that camera and take a snap shot every 5 minutes and upload the picture to our website.

I would also like to like to be able to make a movie, either real time, or time lapsed that would be good enough quality to play on the air during our newscast.

It needs to be simple, reliable, and easy to setup and maintain. I was thinking about some flavour if Linux, but Windows can’t be ruled out yet.

I took the liberty of buying two Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-250 PCI cards. I plan on using a PIII 550 MHz PC, with 256 mb ram.

I know those cards are way over kill, but the PC is a little on the slow side.

How much Linux software is available our there that can capture video from that card? I’m sure cron jobs can be used to capture, and upload the frames. It would be nice if I could somehow queue jobs remotely, say capture and save video from a approaching storm, or film a live event.

Thanks for any input you may have..

MPlayer and mencoder are very powerful tools for such.

As long as the hardware you install has V4L support it's not that hard.
And as you mentioned, a simple cron job could pick up those pics.

Video capture is not that CPU intensive if you keep the resolution low and don't do much compression of the video.
I was able to capture compressed 512x384 nicely (realtime into divx) on a Duron 800 on a cheap BT848 based
card. On my Athlon I get nice realtime 800x600 encoding into divx with some extra post processing thrown in.
The main thing is, before buying the capture cards, make sure their chipset is supported in linux, you could use
them in windows later on if you really had to, but to be compatible in the first place gives you more options.

You might also be interested in projects like thisone

http://www.linux.com/howtos/VideoLAN-HOWTO/

Also this webpage seems to be dedicated for the support in linux of the chipset your card uses

http://ivtv.sourceforge.net/

Good luck
Bareego