[H-GEN] Video Capture under your choice of Unix.

[Bruce Campbell]

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On 28 Jan 2003, Hilton Travis wrote:

> On Mon, 2003-01-27 at 10:52, David Jericho wrote:
> > On Sun, Jan 26, 2003 at 11:45:34PM +0100, Bruce Campbell wrote:
> > > What would people use to capture quality video (not just frames) under
> > > their preferred varient of Unix? [1]
> >
> > Well, while not my preferred variant (although, one of the better
> > ones), I have most recently used my Indy with its VINO hardware.

I've previously used both Indys and the O2s, and they're (comparitively) a
dream to capture video with and re-broadcast it onwards.  Unfortunately,
that equipment is not available in the current situation.

> I'm looking at producing DivX formatted output.  I'd prefer not to use
> proprietary video formats as my output.

The format touted by the A/V mass marketing campaign is really starting to
annoy me, mainly because only its own, rather annoyingly popular player,
will deal with said format properly.  If I move away from that 'Real'
format, I get a lot more players, and things 'just work'.

Specifically, the configuration of the Apple streaming server is a breeze,
and the Broadcaster application is currently saying 'that looks like a
video source.  I've never seen it before, but I'll use it perfectly
anyway'.

> > > Bonus marks for mentioning the Osprey 220 (viewcast.com), which happens to
> > > be the video capture card that I'm using[2], and extra marks for anything
> > > which produces acceptable QuickTime.
> >
> > Out of curiosity, what model do you have, and where did you buy it?
> > The Osprey stuff looks to be good quality.
>
> The Osprey cards are quite good.  They are most definitely not cheap,
> but they are solid.

As with anything, when they work, the card is solid.  They are prone to
the machinations of Murphy of course, such that even the threat of putting
raw ISDN into the video capture card[1] is enough to make the card stop
working, and require the taking apart of machines to get at the rather
small card, and the digging up of a spare Macintosh to act as a video
encoder over firewire.

So, currently I've got a kinda-Unix (OS X with the BSD inside) doing the
encoding over firewire, and its happily sending the signal upstream.  Of
course, Murphy hasn't finished yet, and has caused a nice feature to be
missing from the cameras that I've got, namely that of passing video
through the camera (ie, from other cameras) to the firewire input.

I'd still like to do something with the original machine and Osprey card,
but unfortunately non-windows support for it is vague, and other encoding
formats using that card are even vaguer.

> > > [2] NT is annoying for remote-controlling of encoding servers.
> > I dunno. SQLSlammer does a pretty good job of it ;)
> ROFL

Heh.

--==--
Bruce.

[1] Big venue, running s-video over the in-venue cat5, someone nearly
    plugged ISDN into the patches I was using.  Ethernet isn't pleasant
    either.


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