This is the first consumer webcam to support 720p video at 30fps. That’s the full 1,280×720, unlike some other attempts at so called HD video for some 2 Megapixel webcam’s that only managed 960×720 which isn’t really HD.
The LifeCam Cinema is of course compatible with Windows Live Messenger, but also with Windows Live Movie Maker and Windows Live Photo Gallery. It’s also compatible with Windows 7 out of the box, as well as Windows Vista and Windows XP. The system requirements are quite high though, as you need at least a dual core 1.6GHz processor, but Microsoft recommends a 3GHz dual core processor and 2GB of memory, which are unusually high specifications for a webcam.
It’s important to remember that the 720p resolution might now work with some video call client and we’re currently uncertain which applications it will work with.

@pato_inbox: I agree. The higher the video definition, the more data and thus the better your internet connection has to be. With the internet speed here in Australia I doubt it’ll be able to transmit at the full 720p HD video at the smooth rate. But that’s not a problem with the camera, and the camera would be great for even just taking home videos for Video Messages or editing on Movie Maker.

As four pocket lint i give them credit four there info on what they posted about LifeCam Cinema – 720p HD widescreen video.

Hear are ture hd spec.

HD Video Formats
The big question with bringing high-def video to consumer computers and camcorders is how to store the HD frames — what compression format to use, and how aggressively to compress so that it is feasible to store and process all that data with desktop and handheld equipment. We can’t just use the same old processing for this much higher resolution — this is a major step up in resolution — from MPEG-2 on DVD and DV on tape at 720 x 480, to HD at what’s called 720p (1280 x 720) and full 1080i (1920 x 1080).

Instead, we need new compression approaches to still be able to fit a reasonable amount of HD video on a consumer devices and storage media — tape cassettes, DVD discs and mini-DVDs on camcorders, small hard disks on camcorders, or even multi-gigabyte solid-state memory cards. The developers of the new high-def disc formats, Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD, were faced with a similar problem — even with higher-capacity optical discs (15 to 50 GB double-sided) they needed to fit several hours of a high-def movie, plus sound tracks, plus special features.

The result of these needs was convergence on several options for storing high-def video: HD MPEG-2, WMV HD, and MPEG-4 AVC / H.264.

- The most direct option is to scale up MPEG-2 to high-def, since it’s well supported from desktop DVD to digital television broadcast equipment. However, this requires significantly more storage with the increased resolution, and newer compression approaches like WMV and H.264 promise the same quality for roughly have the size.

- Microsoft Windows Media Video (WMV) is designed to scale from tiny handheld screens, to Internet streaming, to full-screen TV, to widescreen HD, and so is an especially good option for delivering HD for desktop playback.

- The enhanced MPEG-4, called both AVC (Advanced Video Codec) and H.264, is similarly improved and scalable, and is often used for mobile phones and handheld video devices like the Apple iPod.

All three of these HD video formats were adopted as options for both of the competing high-def disc formats. And they were also used as the basis of new industry formats for HD video in consumer products, using specific variants of MPEG-2 HD (called HDV) and MPEG-4 H.264 (AVCHD) adapted for use in consumer devices, especially small handheld camcorders.

Dealing with HDV
The HDV format was developed by Canon, Sharp, Sony, and JVC in 2003 to fit HD video into the capacity of standard DV media (DV or Mini DV cassette tape), allowing DV-like camcorders to shoot in high-def, and then deliver it to a computer with the same workflow as DV, over USB or FireWire / IEEE 1394 interfaces (www.hdv-info.org).

This required several adaptations to squeeze the HD video to fit into the same tape that is used to store an hour of standard-def DV video. To start, DV is a relatively lightly compressed format, in which each frame is compressed independently, which makes it very convenient for editing. MPEG-2 compresses harder using inter-frame compression, in which frames are compressed in relation to each other, storing only the differences between adjacent frames. This provides better compression (i.e., from DV on tape at 25 Mbps data rate to MPEG-2 on DVD at 9 to 6 Mbps), but is more difficult to edit since each frame can only be decompressed and processed in relation to the group of frames adjacent to it.

The next step for HDV is to compress more aggressively, using a longer group of pictures (GOP) of adjacent frames — which means even more work when editing. And the final trick with HDV for the higher HD resolution is to not store the full 1080i resolution (1920 x 1080), but instead give up some horizontal resolution and use 1440 x 1080.

The HDV video format, then, supports MPEG-2 compressed video, at two widescreen 16:9 resolutions:

- 720p (1280 x 720, progressive), at 19 Mbps (less than DV!)
- 1080i (1440 x 1080, interlaced), at 25 Mbps (same as DV)

at both NTSC and PAL television rates (30 and 25 frames per second):

- 720p at 60p, 30p, 50p, 25p
- 1080i at 60i, 50i

For audio, HDV supports MPEG-1 Audio Layer II compression at 48 kHz sample rate, with 16-bit samples, stereo (2-channel) at 384 kbps data rate.

The result is a nice compromise, fitting HD video into the existing DV workflow — with the same tape capacity, and the same data rates — although requiring significantly more processing, not only for decompressing the larger frames, but for dealing with the larger groups of adjacent frames that need to be processed together.

Another issue for playback and editing on computers is that the HDV file format is optimized for capture on consumer devices, and uses the MPEG-2-TS (Transport Stream) format designed for transmission, and not for data file storage and processing. Unfortunately, not all video software can deal directly with this format, since they expect the common MPEG computer file formats: program streams (typically .MPG, with mixed video and audio) and elementary streams (typically .M2V, with just the video data, plus separate audio .WAV files). Instead, there’s now video in transport stream files with names like .M2T, .MTS, and even .M2TS.

A further confusion is that consumer HD camcorders are no longer just tape-based — the data may be stored on mini-DVD or hard disk or memory cards. As a result, video editing software that was designed to “capture” video (importing it over USB or FireWire from a video camera), now also needs to be able to handle opening the files directly, i.e., after they have been copied directly to hard disk.