The PC was nothing special, just a middle-of-the-road i5 4000-series running plain Ubuntu. The compute requirements were practically nil, so the CPU was actuall

The PC was nothing special, just a middle-of-the-road i5 4000-series running plain Ubuntu. The compute requirements were practically nil, so the CPU was actually overkill for the application. The main considerations are having enough USB bandwidth (hence the need for PCI-E expansion cards), dumping the USB camera data straight to the SSD (no re-encoding, use a proper Gstreamer pipeline or ffmpeg command), and ensuring you can sustain the write speeds (through RAID array). There was some bug in the USB drivers that caused the cameras to reserve more bandwidth than they actually used, limiting their numbers, but that was easy to fix. My guess is that you probably re-encoded the stream, which would indeed drastically limit the number of cameras if their resolution was high enough.