Camera board • Achieving real-time video (or timestamps) on RPi 5 + HQ/Camera 3

Hello

I'm trying to use RPi 5s + HQ cameras to record multiple data streams in parallel with 1millsecond precision at 50-120FPS. I'm aware of external sync via XVS, but my preferred approach (for now!) is to synchronize the wallclocks of RPis using NPT/PTP. This is more robust to single-point failures.

A key issue is getting the real-time (wallclock) of each video frame. The .mkv option is starting to work but there are a bunch of frames dropped on start, and the best hack seems to be to read the saved file timestamp. I'm also reading a few posts where cam 3 module is much worse at dropping frames than previous versions (especially for 100FPS++).

Is this file timestamp hack still the preferred method? Is bypassing the autofocus/etc via user params the state-of-art? E.g. does the GPU/video camera not have access to the RPi wallclock?

I'm aware of the post below - but it seems to also suggest using other approaches, downgrading to RPi 4s? Or installing bookworm?

viewtopic.php?t=361527

Any advice is appreciated, I'd love to post a solution for how to get real-time wall clock timestamps on compressed videos.

Thanks in advance,

Statistics: Posted by catubc — Thu Oct 03, 2024 8:05 am

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