I was wondering if there are any video codecs out there that are suited for extremely low bitrates, especially for webcam input?
Throwing around some numbers: let's say a 160x120 stream that will result around 32kbps or so.
Quality will be poor, probably. However, the video should be "understandable", and the frame rate should be sufficient for movement perception.
Googling it out, I could only find abstracts. Are there any concrete codecs? Any video examples? And ultimately, any usable libraries?
EDIT: Thanks for the answers. I tried to encode a 160x120 pre-recorded clip with H264 targeting 32kbps, and I must admit that the results were preety good.
The quality was actually susprisingly good, which makes me wonder wether this can be done in real time, and without requiring high cpu load?
Take conferencing for an example, where you have to encode one stream, while decoding multiple streams, all in real time.
Answer
At the end of the day, I think you'll probably be best served by running a high-quality modern codec with a very small target bitrate, and let it work its magic. Give x264 a try; I've seen exceptional performance from it at high bitrates, and it's supposedly designed to degrade very well. The biggest problem with x264 is that it'll have relatively high CPU requirements for encoding and decoding, but I think it will provide the best quality at a given bitrate for currently available codecs. And it's standardized!