The main thing for you to key in on is that video, in digital format, is one heck of a lot of data to deal with in real time. Go to Philips web sites and study up on chips called "Video Encoder" and "Video Decoder". Understanding how these work will give you a first hand clue of what will be at the very front end of your transmitting system and what will be at the very tail end of your receiving system.

The best solution that I know for doing this type of thing is to convert the video from cheap camera which is in an analog format to digital using a chip called a video decoder. This chip will produce a 16-bit wide stream of data YUV encoded video data at a 13.5 MHz data flow rate. This flow can be fed into a real time video compression chip such as those used by people that build video conferencing systems. Using ITU standard compression algorithms it is possible to reduce the data flow to 384K bits per second to maintain 30 frames per second video imaging.

There is no 8 bit processor that even comes close to handling this problem. The compression chip that I used in the video conferencing system I designed for RSI Systems was a device from a company called 8x8 that was a very high speed 32-bit ARM core part with a bunch of special compression support hardware built on the chip next to the processor.

A popular video system from Polycom uses a chip from Philips called the Tri-Media to do this type of compression.

Once you get things compressed to 384K bits per second it is possible to select a number of RF radio modem type of devices to send the data over to the destination system. The encryption that you desire should be applied to the compressed data stream so that it can be handled in real time without adding too much additional cost and hardware.

Michael Karas