I use Microsoft LiveMeeting with video. I have been using a DCR-HC62 as my main web streaming camera with fairly good results but now I want to take advantage of my HVR-Z5U.

I found a Composite-to-USB device that would allow me to pipe the signal from the Z5 to my the USB on my laptop, but the quality of the video was horrible.... didn't look like HD at all...

Does anyone have any advice, thoughts, experience that could lead me down the right path?

Thanks in advance....

Well first off, you can't get HD off of a composite cable, the Z5 will bring it down to SD before sending out the video.

You can get HD or SD off the component cables, but if you want live HD video, you're best quality is going to be out of the HDMI port.

I don't know much about LiveMeeting, but I have a feeling that could be the problem, or your USB to composite. Video takes up a lot of bandwidth, & I'm guessing that either or both of these products you're using are compressing the hell out of the video signal to get it to stream.

Raw DV or HDV video is about 250MB / min. That is a lot to stream w/o some serious hardware & a super fast network.

At the very least I would assume that the Z5 does better in lower light & has richer colors than your DCR-HC62. But if 98% of the video is getting compressed & thrown away, I wouldn't be surprised if you don't see that great of a difference.

I would say your best bet is to see if there is anything that goes from HDMI to web streaming. Or just to google "HD video streaming" and see what comes up. Good luck.