USB MultiCam for Android

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petik0
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USB MultiCam for Android

Post by petik0 »

Can't wait to see the grand prix version available for android. Wondering if it would be possible to add support for an external camera (connected via USB host) in addition to another android device. There's a bunch of work that's been done to support this in android but it's unfortunately not natively support yet...

basic usb camera support app:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/deta ... mera&hl=en

openxc library on github:
https://github.com/openxc/android-webcam

generaly usb slave communication examples:
http://developer.android.com/guide/topi ... ssory.html
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Harry
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Re: USB MultiCam for Android

Post by Harry »

Is the quality of USB cams good enough to make them a better choice than another smartphone or one of the well known action cams?

- Harry
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bulls23
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Re: USB MultiCam for Android

Post by bulls23 »

Additionally I think it would drain the battery rather quick not being able to charge the phone and having to power the additional cam.
petik0
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Re: USB MultiCam for Android

Post by petik0 »

There are plenty of 1080p cams out there, and you're really not going to overlay anything with a larger res anyway. If you hard-wire the cam in the car, there's no reason to have the phone power it. I currently keep my table (instrumentation/harry's) plugged in while at the track. With some USB Y-connector work, you can accomplish this easily.

Now I currently use a gopro as my second cam and it just doesn't work right. The work involved in getting the videos off the camera, cut them up, re-encode them, drop them on the phone and then run overlay is not worth what i'm getting out of it. In the end I end up with a choppy video (i suppose this may be limited to gopro2's). The main reason I even use a go pro is because my tablet that run's harry's is mounted such that its own camera cannot record a useful video - i played around with the location and it just doesn't work. You can see the tablet location here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1qu0w4BxVg

I think getting android phones working in multicam like you can get iphones would be good, but then you're talking the expense of a second android phone with decent cam and hardware specs so you're likely out ~$300. This on its own is not as big of a deal other than subsequently still getting the video off the phone. Also because it's a phone, it's considerably harder to leave this guy hard-wired in the car permanently as it self-discharges quickly and then requires access to in order to put it in slave mode again. Until the gopro mode works seamlessly, this is still a superior method.

Mounting phones in an open cockpit car is additionally quite complicated since there aren't many roll-bar mounts that are good for the track. I found the ram-mount x-grip is crap for the track as it swivels in hard turns. Getting a small bullet cam or a gopro mounted is much easier since you can make it a more permanent mount.

In my dream world, all my cameras would power up with a flick of a switch and recording on everything could be started by hitting record on laptimer...
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bulls23
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Re: USB MultiCam for Android

Post by bulls23 »

Well I guess your dream world is reality already...just depends on how you use it. You could simply get yourself a bunch of Gopros (or other actions cams with multi cam control like some Sonys), a remote that goes with it, hard mount all of it to your car and press record whenever you like. HLT could be running on any device just logging the data (internal GPS or external GPS, OBDII). Afterwards you simply get your videos and data on your PC / Mac and use some Software like Dashware, Trackvision or Racerender to do the overlaying and multi cam stuff.
You could also simply overlay a blank green, blue or black screen video in HLT and use it together with your other videos and edit them in any appropriate editing software. It's not that hard and you get the hang of it pretty quick, encoding is a lot faster on a decent PC / Mac and layout possibilities are endless.
You could also get rid of the Android stuff and trade it in for an Apple device. Much better hardware encoding, better device specific mounts etc. If you enjoy video overlaying, then iOS is the way to go at the moment...too much compatibility issues on Android if you ask me.
petik0
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Re: USB MultiCam for Android

Post by petik0 »

I should add that the post-processing should be one button as well...and that's really where Harry's shines as long as everything you want to do was generated on that device to begin with.

I'm aware of the support on iOS, that's why my request was for Android specifically. I bought into Android years ago and I'd like to avoid mixing iOS and Android. I've nothing against iOS per se, simply the fact that I'm running Android on all my other devices and the two don't really jive day to day. Nor is it a reasonably affordable way to go - I'd need at least two devices to start with.

I did play with post-processing in Trackvision and Racerender and the amount of work that goes into it sucks. Just getting the lap start time to line up properly is a pain. There are a handful of other app packages out there that can do datalogging - the advantage of the laptimer is that it's the "whole package". It can do nearly everything and does it well. If the video recording works right, you can go from racing/datalogging, video recording to overlaying and uploading to youtube all from a single device.
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Re: USB MultiCam for Android

Post by qsilver_za »

Hi,

I have an android tablet mounted as my day to day media and audio, I use another app other than Harrys to record USB video from a web cam and a microphone input from my USB Audio DAC it works well. Is it hard to add support for these inputs ? Saves having to shell out for a gopro or something similar and I can have it permanently mounted, my problem is I can't use the usb recording app and harrys at the same time and obviously would prefer to have it all work off of one application...
tomprout
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Re: USB MultiCam for Android

Post by tomprout »

+1

This thread is pretty old... any update on this topic?
I just bought an Android stero unit especially to have HLT on a big screen and I really would like to have USB camera support.
tomprout
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Re: USB MultiCam for Android

Post by tomprout »

Up!
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