[Yaggo]

To clarify, the "3D video feature" is nothing more than being able to record simultaneously from two cameras and merge the video inputs into side-by-side H264 stream. Combined with hardware H264 encoding with delay of ~100 ms, this is very useful for certain applications (in my case, live 3D video broadcasting from UAV). I'm not aware of any other "tinkerer-friendly" board capable of that.

[imtringued]

The hardware accelleration for H264 sounds interesting. Although 100ms is not as ideal as I want but it's reasonable. Is it actually possible to use this feature in practice? Are proprietary drivers an issue?

Also is it possible to browse the web and e.g. watch videos on youtube with adequate performance on an RPi? (different topic)

[Yaggo]

> Is it actually possible to use this feature in practice? Are proprietary drivers an issue?

I've streamed 3D video over wifibroadcast¹ to OSVR headset, no fundamental issues. The exact lag depends on resolution, fps, etc settings. It would be superb to cut the delay to sub-50 ms range, but that's probably not going to happen as it would require major rewrite of the H264 stack, as currently there are always two full frames in the pipeline, e.g. in 30 fps it makes 1000/30*2 -> ~70 ms delay². (Note that I'm not the author of the befinitiv website.)

The foundation has released open-source driver stack³ (raspivid etc), but AFAIK they have rather limited resources for software development (single ex-broadcom developer?) and limited access to proprietary features (documentation?) of the Broadcom chipset. Many things work but I think the capabilities of the SOC aren't yet fully utilized.

> Also is it possible to browse the web and e.g. watch videos on youtube with adequate performance on an RPi? (different topic)

No personal experience, but RPi 3 should be okayish for lightweight desktop use (YMMV) with 1 GB of RAM being main limitation for multitasking.

[1] https://befinitiv.wordpress.com/wifibroadcast-analog-like-tr... [2] https://befinitiv.wordpress.com/2015/09/10/latency-analysis-... [3] https://github.com/raspberrypi/userland

[cr0sh]

I'm thinking something like this could be used for a depth sensing application; a visual rangefinder.