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I am working on a 3D body scanner using 40 Canon 100D cameras. For image transfer, I tried USB hubs and cables, however, I got the error if I connect more than 26 cameras to the PC (Windows 10). Recently, I got to know about USB over IP, and I wanted to know if someone has used these devices for image transfer. Is it possible to connect all the cameras to the PC using USB over IP and transfer images and or control the cameras?

Thank you in advance.

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    I'd be inclined to contact a movie company & see how they do it. I work in the industry so I've been in them many times, but never seen how they're set up. 40 cameras isn't actually that many by big budget movies standards - they're up to about 240 these days, so it definitely can be done… to a laptop.
    – Tetsujin
    Jan 1, 2022 at 11:30
  • @Tetsujin Definitely, it is possible. However, I am having trouble connecting cameras using USB hubs and cables. When I connect more than 26 cameras, I get an error saying the device is not recognized. After some research, I found that this might be a hardware limitation.
    – jHz
    Jan 1, 2022 at 11:35
  • It would also be worth checking how many actual, separate USB host controllers the PC has. Each host should be able to take 127 devices if you can correctly power them. I've never seen anyone in the movie industry ever use a PC, they all have Macs. I wonder whether there's a difference in the number of distinct buses?
    – Tetsujin
    Jan 2, 2022 at 10:00

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USB over IP won't help you in this case: The problem is, that Windows can't handle the 40 cameras via USB, no matter if it is direct USB or USBoIP.

I had a similar project once (Video surveillance), and what worked fine is to use a few Rasperry Pi (or similar) computers with ca. 4-8 cameras each, that download the image via USB and pass it on via Ethernet. This has been working flawlessly for years now.

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  • I might use Raspberry Pi at the end but is there no other solutions to connect many cameras to a PC?
    – jHz
    Jan 1, 2022 at 11:47
  • Most likely not easily, but definitly not with Windows: The USB address space is not infinite. You can try attaching 20 each on different USB root hubs (i.e. different USB controllers) on an OS, that will handle those as two trees, not as two branches of one tree (e.g. Linux)
    – Eugen Rieck
    Jan 1, 2022 at 11:55
  • Thank you, sir! I can switch to Linux as well but I want to try with Windows first. While doing some research about USB host controllers and PCI cards, I found this PCIe card with independent host controllers. I am not sure if this will work with Windows OS to connect 40+ cameras.
    – jHz
    Jan 1, 2022 at 12:06
  • In Windows, these will be treated as a single device tree. You can try out, if it helps, but you could start with a cheap card and your onboard to see, if this helps or not.
    – Eugen Rieck
    Jan 1, 2022 at 12:44

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