i was wondering if there might be a way to use the arduino to display composite video on a laptop through usb or even over ethernet with a shield?
If you can show any way of passing composite video over USB or ethernet, I guess it may be possible.
ok, well can anyone think of an option using the arduino to display video from say a dvd player to a laptop. using any input or output options?
I'm not sure what it is you're trying to do, but a simple standard definition analogue video signal has a bandwidth of around 5 - 5.5 MHz - it's not the sort of thing a 16MHz 8 bit processor is built for.
Can you explain what sort of quality would be acceptable?
If you want to get video onto a laptop, there are USB digitisers available for around the cost of a couple of Arduinos.
just wondering if there was a way to use the arduino to capture video from a source such as composite video and display it on a laptop. i was thinking of a security camera or even a gaming system if the quality was good enough. i know there are products out there that will do what i want i was just wanting to tinker around. thanks for the help.
If you do a search you will find this comes up regularly. Basically the answer is always no sorry. The arduino isn't fast enough and there isn't enough memory to store even one frame of video.
Actually, the Arduino is more than fast enough for audio; it is also fast enough to at least grab a frame or so per second, if you make the frame size small enough (maybe 160 x 120 x 1 bpp).
The problem with video is memory - there isn't enough RAM even on the 328 to store such an image (you need slightly over 2K). Now, you could possibly use an external I2C RAM device to store the frame, but you're not going to get great frame rates. You might also be able to stream the data and store it on the computer itself, but once again, don't expect any great frame rates (you would be lucky to get 1 FPS).
With that said, I have no doubts that it is possible to process video in some manner with an Arduino, at least on the input side of things (outputting video is another matter - it too is possible, but not at any great resolution, plus it is very difficult to get timings right for NTSC composite; PAL is probably the same). I own a TRS-80 Color Computer with 64K running at under 1 MHz with an 8-bit CPU and a video digitizer cartridge that can digitize video (slowly); it is able to create a much higher resolution image (256 x 192 x 1 bpp), but it has the memory to do so. This is a computer from the early 1980's. It should be possible with an Arduino.
It would probably be fairly easy to do with a 644-based "Arduino" system (like what the Fuzebox uses).
Somewhere around here is a video of 8 x 8 x 1bpp 25/30Hz "video" on an Arduino, capturing during one field, and processing during the other.
Maybe of some use for navigation in high-contrast environments, but not very watchable.
This is a computer from the early 1980's. It should be possible with an Arduino.
Yes but the TRS80 wasn't doing any of the video processing. All it was doing was to manipulate memory. Then hardware scanned that memory out to create a video signal.
You can do the same thing with an arduino if you want but it is tricky because the arduino does not have a conventional bus structure and addressing extra memory through the limited I/O ports can be quite convoluted.
You can look at dual ported RAM to make this easer. Similarly you can stream video and digitise it directly into RAM and have a processor pick out bytes and do things with it. However, this takes a lot of extra hardware and while it could be designed anyone asking the question is probably not capable of doing it.
This is the sort of design I used to do in the 70s and we have moved on a lot since those days.