[Nottingham] Webcam snapshots

[Martin]

> Just wondering...how would the cams behave if they had power over USB,
> but nothing was actively watching the streams?  Directed to null, if you
> will.
> Could you somehow frig around with a hub to behave as such, and the
> quickly round-robin the cams?

Nice idea except that if active, they still stream data taking up the
full USB2 bandwidth. All you do with /dev/null is dump the data that
is being streamed. The data is still being transferred over the USB.


Next plan is to see if there are any settings I can tweak to reduce
the 2 seconds "startup + grab time" per webcam. I can't believe they
can take so long to initialise!

Thanks Duncan for the comparable timings tests.

Cheers,
Martin