[Coco] Re: Help - There that got your attention.

[Brett K Heath]

On Sat, 13 Aug 2005, Mannequin* wrote:

> On Sat, 13 Aug 2005 20:22:33 -0500
> Dave Kelly <daveekelly at earthlink.net> wrote:
>
> > Dennis Bathory-Kitsz wrote:
> > > At 05:43 PM 8/13/05 -0500, Dave Kelly wrote:
> > > The only thing I don't understand in your questions is why you want to
> > > upload individual images instead creating one of the common video streams
> > > (Windows Media, Real, Mpeg, Shockwave or QT).
> >
> > What you're seeing is frustration on my part. I have not found linux
> > based software to  produce a video stream.
>
> Dave, I think there is / was a QuickTime server made for Linux... I think my
> brother used to use it a lot, although, it may have only been audio. I'll ask
> him, and if there is anything to report, I'll post back here. Otherwise, "No
> news is BAD news."


Video streams in linux?

google on the following names

cinelerra
(a full blown quicktime based recording and post production facility)

transcode
(a modular and very flexible command line tool that can do capture,
denoise, encoding, translation between various codecs and container
formats, and a few dozen other things)

VideoLan
(A set of tools designed to do network video streaming under linux)

All are freely available and have gnu or near gnu licensing terms.

I'm most familiar with transcode and cinelerra (cinelerra is the successor
to Broadcast 2000).
transcode has a _lot_ of dependencies but you don't
need all of them unless you want to use all the available facilities.
About the only thing it doesn't have is a good nonlinear editor, but you
can use avidemux2 (which I understand is roughly equivalent to kino,
whatever that is;-) for that.

Cinelerra was apparently written by a video engineer to be a professional
quality video production tool, including a respectable array of effects
and some ability to deal with other formats than quicktime, it can render
to mpeg2 or mpeg4 for example. Note, don't be intimidated by the
recommended hardware or the mention of needing a server farm for
rendering, I've used it successfully on an Athlon thunderbird with 256 meg
of ram. Rendering is of course very slow and some aspects of the interface
don't work as smoothly with slower machines but it is intelligently
designed software that doesn't choke completely just because the back-end
is underpowered.

VideoLan was originally developed at a french university specifically for
video streaming applications, a friend who was evaluating various
solutions for video conferencing and such speaks very highly of it as an
integrated solution.

There is some other stuff out there but I think these three are the top
contenders (or were as of the beginning of the year), and they will
interoperate to a certain extent (you kind of have to know the magic
incantations to get this to work though).

The real problem is that unless you have a hardware encoder or a truly
monster machine you have to capture raw, and this eats disk space at an
incredible rate (we're talking tens of gigabytes an hour, or more).

HTH

Brett K. Heath