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Does anyone know if that means the Pi 4 can record for a longer period of time (it supports up to 8GB RAM iirc)?



Probably some, but not to the degree that you may think. This relies on DMA in the CSI controller, but only a fraction of a pi4's RAM is accessible by DMA. Basically from the video core side, there's only a 32-bit bus to main memory, and it has to share that with MMIO space and there's mirrors with/without caching sort of like a MIPS. Probably maxes out after a couple GB or so.


Could you split output from a single camera to multiple pi's?


I haven't read the article, but the parent comment makes it sound as though it's not so much the capacity of the bus, but rather the speed of the bus itself. This is usually expressed in terms of a combination of CAS latency and frequency in MHz, the Pi 4 being DDR4, is likely in the neighborhood of 2133-3600Mhz. We don't often think of reading/writing to RAM as taking any time at all, but in all actuality the speed of memory is often a significant bottleneck in high performance systems.

If we are just talking about 720p 30fps, then we likely aren't really that close to those memory bottlenecks, so the only limiting factor would be how much storage space you have available to that device.


Its nonsense as I already wrote last time it was posted 2 years ago:

Ram speed is not the issue, camera interface is limited to 120MB/s, ram bandwidth is >2GB/s on pe3, 4GB/s on pe4.

Compressing 640x64@660 takes exactly the same amount of work as compressing 1280x720@30. You could even use hardware h.264 encoder as long as you can debayer raw 10bit in software fast enough (or convince Broadcom employee 6by9 to make internal Videocore firmware debayering resolution agnostic, its already fast enough keeping up with twice the amount of data when using camera in 1920x1080@25 mode). But you dont even need fancy compression, at those framerates things change really slowly so simple delta encoding on raw data will do wonders.


According to the video in the article, the data rate is 66 MB/s (100kB per frame). So a Pi with 8GB of RAM should be able to capture almost 2 minutes of footage.




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