IP camera: Panasonic WV-SP105
Just wanted to share that I've been having good luck using the Panasonic WV-SP105 IP camera with Jitter. This is an interesting cam in that it is powered over Ethernet (PoE) and can send a MJPEG data stream that can be brought into Jitter using Christopher Baker's excellent IPCAM2SYPHON app.
The camera runs at a max of 1280 x 960, and can be set to 16:9 aspect ratio to send 720p frames over the network. I'm running it with a cheap 802.3af compliant PoE switch over Cat5 and it seems rock solid.
At 720p and mid-level frame quality I'm getting 18fps, and can scale to 30fps if I lower the quality further. The compression artifacts are fairly mild and there's on-board noise reduction, but I haven't tested extensively.
The WV-SP105 does H.264 as well, but IPCAM2SYPHON is build to work with MJPEG, so I've disabled that. Incidentally, you can't get above 5fps on the camera in MJPEG if H.264 is enabled.
The camera can only be configured on Windows (the web interface uses ActiveX) but once it's set up it doesn't need much. The documentation is fairly opaque, so feel free to ping me if you buy one and have questions. Street price is ~$265, pretty cheap for an IP camera. Apparently it has face detection features, zones of interest, alarm triggers, and other computational camera routines that can be set up - haven't played with these yet.
For posterity, the (unpublished) URL format for the MJPEG stream is:
thanks jesse, and thanks to the forum for being THE memory...
Hi Jesse, Looks like this camera is no longer commercially available. Any updates on IP camera recommendations?
I haven't used other models as I eventually migrated to SDI cameras to achieve lower latency input. But if you're still looking at IP cameras for your application I can recommend the Arecont models - they have extensive documentation, including the precise URLs for pulling in the MJPEG streams. This is in stark contrast to most other IP cam manufacturers.
FYI the IPCAM2SYPHON utility ended up being pretty unstable, and I migrated to Syphon-Net-Camera, which can still be downloaded here:
It hasn't been updated in a while so I'm not sure if it would be compatible with more recent operating systems.