18 - Drizzle Streams (Rain Sounds, Logitech C920)

Sitting on my back patio smoking Ashton "Rainy Day" out of a Peterson "Shannon" 106.

I'm taking a viewer poll here, what do you think of the Logitech C920? Is it a potato, or not a potato? It still seems to be marketed as one of the "10 best HD webcams", even in 2019, and it's still sold for a whopping $80 on Amazon and most other places. It's been on the market for almost 10 years as far as I know. I hooked it up to my laptop this afternoon and took it outside during a fall rainstorm. I had always been somewhat depressed with the quality of video from this thing, but it turns out that all I needed was the correct initialization string for ffmpeg. For those of you playing along at home, here is the string that produced the capture files you are seeing:

ffmpeg -thread_queue_size 1024 -f alsa -i hw:1 -thread_queue_size 1024 -f v4l2 -input_format mjpeg -video_size 1920x1080 -i /dev/video2 -acodec libmp3lame -ar 44100 -b:a 320k -vcodec mpeg4 -s 1920x1080 -aspect 16:9 -b:v 7000k -r 30 /tmp/avhd.mp4

Notable in this string is the fact that I had to initialize the thread queue size in two places, for the video input and the audio inputs separately. This keeps frames from getting dropped/duplicated or munched up during the capture. The key to getting the C920 to preform at 30fps (instead of the usual 5fps that most camera apps report) is to set the input format to mjpeg (Motion Jpeg). If you set it to yuv420p, mpeg4, libx264 or dshow, you are not going to get decent results.. either because of an internal limitation of the camera, lack of CPU power to keep up with encoding, or both.

As always, please remember to like this video, subscribe, and click on the "bell" icon to get a notification whenever I post a new video! Thanks for watching!

- Steve

#whitenoise #rainsounds #thunder #sleepwell #relaxation