The images for Mario Kart need to be 320x240, so a 1080p webcam is not needed. The webcam I've been having great results with is the Logitech C615 which is overkill for this application. There may be more expensive, better quality pi cameras than the one I bought, but I'm not investing any more into them. There appear to be up to 2 meter extension ribbon cables for this, but I'm not interested in going down the pi camera path anymore and dealing with its shortcomings. In my testing scenario, the pi camera on the short ribbon cable was just annoying. I'm thinking the webcam is going to be the way to go because they're easier to mount, can make use of an easy-to-acquire USB extension cable if installing in a cab some distance away from the RPi, and have the potential for better image quality and low light performance. It's just a difference in one line of code, so I can probably put together instructions that would include either option. I did get the Pi camera working with mjpeg-streamer, but it's definitely not as good as the webcam I'm using, and I'm back to running into frequently unusable jpegs being posted, which basically kills the framerate of the camera in-game.
