Cameras to laptop

I have a USB cam 70 feet from a mini-ITX PC; one 10 foot passive cable and two 30 foot active extenders, one of them outdoors. Works fine.

ftp://jjlarkin.lmi.net/CABIN.JPG

You can put a powered USB hub or two into the system, too.

John

There are video to USB converters - google dazzle

You can usually run the video cable long distances with no problems.

Yeah, I use a mixture of USB and vid-to-USB connections, I've been through a few of them during testing and found KWorld was the least hassle:

(USB 2860 device) works well in Windows XP and Ubuntu.

even the 10m ones?

video-to-usb adaptors.

laptop doesn't have ethernet already?

usb-over-cat5

I'm not sure but aren't these USB1.1 only?

I tried this (only one time) - buying a repeater cable but it failed miserably for me, purchased from eBay - can you tell me what make your extenders are please? I'd like to try it again.

A dirt cheap four channel USB video capture card might do.

I have one identical to that one, works like a charm and is Linux supported. Just don't expect fast frame rates as the four inputs are multiplexed, not a big limitation for video surveillance purposes though.

Yeah, but 13Mb/s should be fast enough for std resolution video. there may be a faster version out there somewhere.

Just on a side note, I was reading about USB 3.0 and it turns out the max (normal) length is no longer 5m, but 3. Bah!