[PLUG-AV] New capture/ingest laptop status

[James Bromberger]

Hello all,
Last night 5 of the AV crew got together to document the opening and
rejection of the EULA that came with the three PLUG laptops. These three
machines are the "video ingest" machines that (on our current set up)
simply capture firewire packets and shuffle the DV video out the
Ethernet port, and permit the operator to use mumble to get directions
form the director (on the dvswitch host).

All three machines were opened and checked, and then had their disks
wiped of all software before booting from the hard disk. We set up PXE
booting with Debian FAI, and then proceeded to install a base OS on
them. At this point in time (Friday morning) the hosts install Debian
Wheezy (testing) with X11, the non-Free Realtek drivers for the Ethernet
NIC[1], gnome 3.0, dvsource, mumble, and the alsa utils for the tally
lights, and installs a user "av".

I have also done a test capturing video from firewire (using the
ExpressCards) and sending this to dvswitch - all OK - and capturing from
the webcam with transcode to DV with ffmpeg, plus capturing an ffmpeg
screen grab with transcode again - and running dvswitch 0.8.3.6 on one
ingest host and the loadav was 0.08 and 60% CPU idle (though the delay
on ffmpeg transcoded sources is around 0.5 sec or more).

The next few customisations I'm working on are:
* Pre-configure mumble
* Auto login GDM as the "av" user, and launch mumble
* Do not suspend on laptop lid close


I'm after any other input that you think we should have installed into
each of these hosts. I'm looking to have the entire installation and use
scripted so we can re-install at any time - or add additional hosts
easily (for larger presentations where we want more than 2 cameras + 1
twinpact - though we could add one additional camera directly on the
dvswitch host easily...).


The shipping of the firewire cards hit a small snag - only 2 of the 3
ordered had actually turned up; the third is expected in mid April.

For those that didn't see earlier, the three identical systems are Dell
Vostro 3400, with a 160 GB HDD, 3 GB RAM, and a 2nd Gen Intel Core i3
2.3 Ghz with 3 MB cache. Dell indicated an invoice will be sent after 2
weeks, which we can then claim back the funds from Lottery West (a
further 2 weeks).



  James


[1] Although most functionality is working without this, one machine
experiences tcp hangs when operating without this, and also complains
about the missing firmware as was seen during a dry run with the CD
installer; so I've added the firmares to the NFS-root install-time
environment, and the installation scripts, along with the libsmbios-bin
utils to read Service Tags, etc, in a class called "DELL".

-- 
/Mobile:/ +61 422 166 708, /Email:/ james_AT_rcpt.to
PLUG President 2012: http://www.plug.org.au <http//www.plug.org.au>
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