I don't know anything about camcorders.
Never owned one, never played with one.
Don't know anyone who's got one or uses one.
Our school has one though (JVC everio hybrid 30GB), and for sport practise our PE instructor would like to stream the output of the camcorder to a laptop. Using VLC media player on the laptop, you can set the cache to 30000 so it provides a delay - players can do something, run over to the laptop, view their performance, and learn from their errors. We tried this with the built in webcam on the laptop, but the quality is too poor - the webcam is really intended only for close-up shots 1-2m distance.
So I'm trying to research how to get the camera to stream. I mean, if a 15€ webcam can do it, surely 300€ camcorders can, right? Well, that is turning out not to be the case...
1)
On the web, there isn't much info about streaming or monitoring camcorder output on a monitor or laptop. Does this mean that most cameras still don't have this capability? I find this very hard to believe! Shouldn't streaming to an external capturing device really be a standard feature of all camcorders by now?
2)
If most newer cameras *do* have this capability (it isn't mentioned in the JVC manual), then how are you supposed to connect them to a laptop? The 'video out' on this camera is a mini-jack, intended to output to a television (cable supplied).
It also has USB out, but I suspect that this can't be used for streaming; only copying files over to a computer for editing? (Even this, though, appears difficult because the camera is not seen by Windows as a 'removable mass storage device').
Is it possible to get a 'mini-jack to firewire', or 'mini-jack to s-video' cable for the purpose of streaming/monitoring? Will it stream through USB if I get special drivers from somewhere?
Thanks!