Comment by martinmunk
4 years ago
My older Logitech C920 has an on-board H.264 encoder. Newer revisions of the same model does not.
I haven't figured out why they chose to remove it, but your point about licensing cost combined with them not advertising it much as a feature, and most of their competitors not including "proper" video encoding might explain it.
Edit: Found an official explanation here: https://www.logitech.com/en-us/video-collaboration/resources... TLDR, they figure most computers at that point had HW encoders.
Unfortunately, this makes it much harder to use these as webcams on a Raspberry Pi (which even has H.264 hardware acceleration – the bottleneck is decoding the MJPEG stream from the camera, for which ffmpeg does not have hardware acceleration on the RPi).
As an alternative to ffmpeg, GStreamer provides hardware accelerated MJPEG decoding on the Pi. I think there are bugs, though, which makes it unsuitable for some use cases. Here's an example pipeline - https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?p=1989575#p1989...