I'm working on video capture and editing type stuff this weekend.
The good news is the Linux 1394 driver is awesome! I already had it
compiled in my kernel from a while back, and when I plugged in my
camcorder and started up kino, I could simply hit play to remote-control
the camera or record to capture an AVI. No sweat whatsoever.
So far I captured 45 minutes of video to almost 10 gigs of AVIs. Whoa
that's a lot of data!
However the devil's in the details. My nagging problem of the moment is
that kino doesn't like the sound driver for my sound chip, apparently.
It simply hangs if I try to play video and audio at the same time, or
capture with audio monitoring turned on. I looked at the code, it's very
straightforward, open up /dev/dsp and dump data to it, so I don't see
what the big deal is. Anyway the sound built-in to this motherboard is
crappy, so I really want to get kino using some sort of network audio
server on another machine which is the one I usually have hooked up to my
stereo; I intended that it would be the "mixer" machine for all the
others. I installed nas, and I have KDE's artsd using NAS and sending
audio to the other machine. That's the furthest I've ever gotten with
NAS in my several attempts, although at various times I've done the same
thing with esd and with artsd's own network support.
However there's supposed to be this wrapper called audiooss which can
intercept calls to /dev/dsp and redirect the data to NAS. That's the
sort of thing I need for kino, but it's not working.
aRTs has a wrapper too and that is also not working.
Just to go totally over the top, last Friday I ordered one of these
http://www.ymouse.com/product/pxkeditor.htm
It will be interesting to try getting that working with Kino. It can
already work with 2 other kinds of jog-shuttle controls so at least I
will have some example code.
I should probably test my ability to convert to MPEG and burn VCDs before
I get much further with actual editing. (If all else fails I can slink
off to my mom's house and use her iMac.)
And I found several consumer DVD players which have all the appropriate
bells and whistles - compatibility with CD-Rs, CD-RWs, firmware
upgradeable by CD-R, hacked firmware available which disables Macrovision
and region-coding, and one of them even has a CF slot so you can listen
to MP3s or look at JPGs in that format as well as CD-R. I think that's
the one I want to get for my wife's mom in Belarus. It also can convert
NTSC to PAL and PAL to NTSC, and works on all voltages worldwide.
I heard the SoundBlaster Live's Linux driver can handle multiple audio
streams at once, so I think maybe I'll get one of those for my "master
mixer" machine and then I can run artsd, esd and nasd all at the same
time. But I still have to get kino to actually use one of them.
--
_______ Shawn T. Rutledge / KB7PWD ecloud@bigfoot.com
(_ | |_) http://ecloud.org kb7pwd@kb7pwd.ampr.org
__) | | \________________________________________________________________
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