I want to buy a new webcam - please help

[rasta]

Hello all, I am a new member so please be gentle.

I want to buy a webcam which I want to use to take videos of myself. I need one so that I can practice my interview skills.

I already have the PLAYSTATION eyetoy and can take videos with this but the software creates videos which are just too large. (a five minute video takes up about 500MB in space

Of course I can then compress these files but I want software which will do the compression on the fly and produce smaller AVI's. Has anyone bought a decent webcam with software with it which doesn't have this bloat problem associated with it?

I don't intend to use it on the internet, just for personal reasons, that is to take videos of myself.

If you know of some piece of software I can use with the eyetoy then that would be good also.

[zoltaaaan]

I don't know if ANY cameras encode video instantly, especially webcams. Even professional digital cameras create humongous files which you have to compress subsequently.
But just think about it, if it takes a 2-3GHz processor about 30 minutes to encode a 1h movie, how could a camera record and encode a movie instantly?

[rasta]

Well I downloaded Windows Media Encoder which is a hell of a lot better than that other crap I used: amcap or vidcap, I can't remember.

The compression and everything is decent as well. BTW my webcam is capable of recording videos 640*480 and I have an Athlon XP 2600+ and it all works perfectly.

Thanks