[PLUG-AV] Result of 1st AV Workshop at Artifactory

[Jason Nicholls]

> Thanks to Tim B, we have two working, old PCs, both with firewire cards. One
> is running Debian stable (updated from an old install) and the other was, at
> last view, having some trouble with the update from an old install. The
> Firewire card I purchased from Amazon appeared to be detected with no
> problem, and DVsource is installed. When DVsource fires up, it wants to
> connect to DVswitch, which we should have on a more powerful machine.
>
> Mark Tearle donated a bunch of kit, including the second PCI firewire card;
> we have one spare PCI express firewire card if such a beasty machine
> appears.
>
> A third PC, which may fit the bill of being more powerful,  appears to be
> dead - Tim B is suggesting a replacement mobo.
>
> We have DV firewire cameras available to borrow with people's presence from
> Nick, Mark, and myself.

Unfortunately I haven't found anything that will allow me to switch my camera
to PAL mode (from NTSC) so it's a no go mixing it up with your cameras and
dvswitch :(



> The equipment is now stored in Nick's cabinet at Artifactory. We're
> tentatively meeting this Saturday, or similar time next week. I have yet to
> get the WAF (Wife Approval Factor) for this for me, but that doesn't stop
> everyone else from playing.
>
> Next steps that I can see (chime in here):
> * DVSwitch host to be up, running, and ready to accept sources and
> compress/encode output to icecast, and run the mumble server ("murmur").
> * We need a third DVSource host; old PC with firewire and ethernet (2
> cameras, one Twinpact)
> * USB camera on a stick: basic camera boom - with dvsource-v4l2. We could
> potentially add the audio from this as well into the mix (possibly faded out
> most of the time??).
> * Audio mixing: Either USB audio cards to connect our multiple line-in or
> mic voltage audio sources, or a small multi channel audio deck. Currently we
> have one radio mic (the radio transmitter can have either lapel or handheld
> mic plugged in, one at a time).
>
> Anything else?

I've been doing more testing with encoding and using the latest ffmpeg and
x264 building from source. The results are that it's faster but still
on my system
(dual-core 2.1ghz) it's too slow to do on-the-fly good quality encoding that's
reasonably small. So you either get a fatter nice quality stream or a smaller
low quality stream. Doing less-than-real-time encoding I've found some really
good settings to produce very nice video at very small sizes (~150MB/hr at
PAL rates). A combination of good de-interlacer (yadif), de-noiser (hqdn3d),
and unsharp filter (unsharp) really make a diff to the video output, then
encoding with x264 (crf of 30 or 28).

I've used ogg theora/vorbis but the output isn't as good for filesize...


Jason Nicholls
jason at mindsocket.com.au
0430 314 857