Recording 720p 30fps vids from T420/s webcam?

Hi fellow Lenovo owners,

I currently use a T420s and mostly very happy with it. There's one thing that I couldn't get to work to my satisfaction, and thats the built in webcam. It says when I ordered it that its "720p".

Thus far, I've been only able to capture 1280x720 vids @ ~10 fps (capture was set at 30fps), using virtualdub, recording to a ramdisk.

Using windows movie maker, I can only capture at 640x360, and I can't seem to find any settings or options that I can change to make it 720p.

Does anyone has any experience using the builtin webcam to record at 720p with higher than 10fps?

 

What if you try it in a brighter environment? Maybe it's on low light mode?

 

Interesting suggestion. I have not seen a way to check what mode its operating in, but the lighting conditions in which I've tried to record with the webcam is typically fluorescent.

Were you able to record at 1280 x 720 @ 30fps under "bright" environments? What kind of software do you use?

 

I just have a T400... for now. I also don't use my webcam except for occasional video calls; I have never tried recording something with it.

 

I have a T420 and I've noticed the same issue. I only get 7-8 fps when recording at 720p. My cpu usage is only around 10%, so maybe it's a driver issue?

 

so does anyone get good frame rates at 720p?

 

Hi mate, I've kinda figured out a way.

I could get 30fps @ 1280x720 by using mjpg.

Try using virtualdub, and choose "MJPG" as the colorspace/compression and 1280x720 as the output size.

If you don't have a SSD, try recording to a RAMDisk to avoid dropping frames.

Also, if you use virtualdub, choose the "hide display on capture" option to avoid dropping more frames.

 

souldnt the gma3000 be able to do 1080p H264 encode/decode?