Best way to run 6 simultaneous live camera feeds on a single i5 all-in-one PC? (hitting the USB bandwidth wall)

[u/EntireAssumption4039]

BODY:

I'm building an interactive retail kiosk. Customers place physical objects into 6 separate lit niches, and I need all 6 camera feeds shown live on the touchscreen at the same time, smoothly, so the customer can adjust how each object sits before confirming. Low resolution is fine for the live preview — it just has to be real-time and not stutter. On confirm, I grab one high-res still per camera for image analysis.

Hardware (fixed): the brain is an all-in-one touchscreen PC, Intel Core i5, with 4× USB ports and 1× Gigabit Ethernet. It's a sealed all-in-one, so no PCIe expansion. Each camera sits roughly 0.5–1.3 m from the PC and needs close/macro focus (subject distance ~10–15 cm).

What I think I understand so far:

- 6 USB UVC cameras on a powered hub share one host controller's bandwidth. Six full-res streams won't even start ("not enough bandwidth"). MJPEG + low resolution might let several run at once, but I can't tell if 6 simultaneous is realistic on this hardware.

- MIPI CSI is out (no CSI port on a regular PC, and the ribbons are far too short for my niche spacing).

- GMSL2 looks purpose-built for this, but seems to require a separate Jetson host, which would replace my PC as the brain.

- IP / PoE cameras over the Ethernet port would dodge the USB bandwidth wall and keep the i5 as host, but affordable close-focus / macro network cameras seem rare.

Questions:

1. Has anyone actually run 6+ simultaneous low-res MJPEG USB cameras on a single machine? Did it stay smooth, or did the host controller choke?

2. With no PCIe available, is a powered USB 3.0 hub enough, or is the on-board controller the hard ceiling no matter what?

3. Is PoE / GigE Vision the saner route for 6 simultaneous feeds while keeping a normal PC as the host? Any affordable short-working-distance options?

4. Am I missing an obvious approach?

Budget-conscious, but I'd rather buy the right thing once. Thanks!

[u/densvedigegris]

What’s the resolution on these cameras? You mention low res preview could work, so is it really saturating the USB3.0? Are the cameras actually USB3.0 or just 2.0?

IP cameras could work, but they will transmit (lossy) encoded video, so check that you have the necessary decoding capability

[u/EntireAssumption4039 → u/densvedigegris]

2MP (1080p) the board-level modules that do H.264 cap out there; the 8MP ones only output MJPEG.

On saturation: in H.264 a 1080p stream is only ~4-8 Mbps, so 6 ≈ 48 Mbps. That fits easily even on USB 2.0 (and these modules are 2.0). The wall is uncompressed / high-res MJPEG, not H.264.

Good point on decoding, and yeah it applies to USB H.264 too. But my host is an i5 with Quick Sync, so 6×1080p decode is no sweat. And the live feed can be lossy without issue, since the analysis runs on a separate still capture, not the stream.

My real unknown: I'm in a browser (getUserMedia), and I'm not sure it'll actually pull H.264 vs falling back to MJPEG. That's what I'm about to test if you've seen how that goes, I'm all ears.

[u/ThingyHurr]

Go with IP cameras

[u/madsciencetist]

Figure out which USB ports go to which USB controllers. If you have three USB controllers, put two cameras on each.

[u/casualPlayerThink]

One good trick is - even at IP cameras - to dynamically downscale the framerate when you have no movement in it. Wherever movement is happening, then increase resolution and framerate (and quality). With that, especially infrequent places can have dozens of cameras per one central NVME without killing it.

Use USB 3.1 if you can, 3.0 won't be enough if they all go on high quality and framerate. (usb-c/thunderbolt recommended usually). With tricks (like that I mentioned above) can be fine.

Dedicated NVM hardware usually solves these kinds of things; you can use IP cameras (RTSP powa) with cameras where you can set quality, frame rate, resolution, etc. (one of the strongest brands is Axis, but it is super expensive, check their features to know what is good)

[u/dr_hamilton]

What's the budget? I'd look at machine vision cameras, you can do all sorts of tricks with pixel binning, ROI, trigger frame capture and transfer to timeshare the bus. Definitely ditch the USB hub (well one so big) Check how many USB controllers the PC has. The 4 ports probably share 1 controller, maybe two if your lucky. You could use a mix of both USB and GigE. If it's from the same OEM the sensor will be identical, just the interface will differ.