I recently bought a 1994 Chevy Suburban. I love the car, it has Lotsa room for all the customization I want to do with it. What I am doing is I am mounting cameras in the front (inside the grill), and rear view. The camera in the front is a switch Normal/IR camera. The basic idea is that for night driving, I want to be able to see things farther than the headlights can show. I believe that Cadillac is designing a system similar to this. Why is this under game development you may ask? Well I want to mount the display behind the steering wheel (where the speedometer, tach, and all that mumbo jumbo is.) What I need to do is make a program that will run on my carputer (computer guts stuffed into the modded glovebox that are operational) that will take the video input from the camera through a TV Capture card, and make it into a surface texture in OpenGL or DirectX. This is a really baffling thing to do because, 1) I need to know how can I turn the Stream from the capture card into a usable "media buffer." 2) I need to take that stream, and create a surface textured with the live video. When I am all done, I will have a dash-mounted LCD screen that displays the live IR input from the video and the Speed, RPMs and engine warning lights, all through a program. I am developing a program for my AVR Microprocessor to recieve signals from the cars ODB port and translate that into an input for my comp through the Serial port. When the Engine gives an error, I will translate that all in my program. While this isn't Technically Game programming, I hope you don't delete this thread, because it deals with Game Development API's. [EDIT] I did a little more research on this, and it appears that a way I could do this, is to capture a frame from the TV Tuner, put it into a bmp, and then load that as the texture, all from the same program. My question there is, it seems awfully inefficient to IO with the hard drive Every frame for 30 fps. So my question is, after I do a frame grab routine from the Capture card, can I store the "bmp" in ram or video ram, and access it like that? [Edited by - neonic on April 26, 2005 9:38:10 PM]

It depends on the video card, but I know that Linux definitely has an interface for accessing live streaming video from a capture device. You might be able to build the box with a Linux basis, slap on a custom v4l app and then use that.

Might I recommend not doing this? Adding a DVD player to your car cranks your insurance way up already, I'd rather not get t-boned by someone surfing for pr0n on the M4.