[PLUG-AV] some playing around with my camera.

[Jason Nicholls]

Hey Guys,

I have a 3CCD DV camera (Panasonic PV-GS150) and finally got around to
seeing whether it had pass-through DV over firewire, and it does! This
was purchased from the US though and the DV stream is 720x480 @ 30fps
(NTSC) versus 720x576 @ 25fps (PAL) - not configurable as far as I
could see via the menus. This might cause a problem if we're using
multiple DV streams and switching between them... The camera also
supports wide DV which puts out 720x480 (872x480 after applying aspect
ratio to get square pixels).

I used dvgrab to dump the raw video and everything just worked
auto-magically. i.e. plug in camera, turn on, run dvgrab. This is with
Ubuntu 10.10.

I also did some more testing to see about encoding in real-time and
discovered that my laptop isn't gutsy enough. The laptop is a macbook
with Core 2 Duo T8100 (2.1Ghz). This is fast enough for high quality
flv encoding, but the resulting compression isn't as good as x264 or
theora. In fact it can do flv just using the one CPU and still hit
30fps no probs. theora or x264 encoding dropped things down to less
than 10fps using both CPUs. Might be my settings too - i'm just about
to watch the LCA video to see what they do.


Jason