Stream a DV-camera using vlc
This material is work-in-progress ... Do not follow instructions here until this notice is removed. |
In this howto we are going to stream the video coming from a DV-camera connected through ie1394 (firewire).
vlc is used to stream the content.
We will be using h264 and AAC to transcode the stream (should be fairly easy to change to whatever suits your needs).
Setup Alpine
Initial Setup
Follow Installing_Alpine to setup Alpine Linux.
Install programs
apk add vlc-daemon vlc-dev
The 'require vlc-dev' thing is reported at http://bugs.alpinelinux.org/issues/1051 and might be solved soon (or 'vlc-dev' really is needed as a dependency).
Using ACF to control vlc
But as it is optional you could just skip this ACF section.
Setup/install acf (unless it's not already done).
setup-acf
Install acf-package for vlc
apk add acf-vlc-daemon
We won't describe in this tutorial how you would use ACF to control vlc-daemon (basically because it's so simple it does not need any describing).
If you installed ACF, just browse https://ip.of.your.box and you would from this tutorial understand what to do.
Configure vlc
Configuration is done by modifying '/etc/conf.d/vlc'.
Here comes the actual configuration that makes vlc stream the DV-camera.
############### BITRATE=500 XRES=720 YRES=576 ############### # Chose one of the following 'preset' values depending on how fast your CPU is: # ultrafast,superfast,veryfast,faster,fast,medium,slow,slower,veryslow,placebo TVIDEO="venc=x264{preset=ultrafast,vbv-maxrate=${BITRATE},vbv-bufsize=256,keyint=250,min-keyint=25},vcodec=h264,vb=${BITRATE},scale=1,width=${XRES},height=${YRES}" TAUDIO="acodec=mp4a,ab=96,channels=2,samplerate=44100" TMISC="deinterlace,audio-sync" ############### TRANSPORT="std{access=http,mux=ts,dst=:8080}" VLC_OPTS="--daemon -I dummy dv:///dev/fw0 --rawdv-hurry-up --sout-keep --sout-transcode-audio-sync \ --file-logging --logfile /var/log/vlc/vlc.log \ --sout #transcode{$TVIDEO,$TAUDIO,$TMISC}:$TRANSPORT"
Start it up
Prepare the hardware
Here comes the hardest part in this tutorial... Attach the DV-camera to your ie1394/firewire port.
Well... that wasn't too hard! :-)
Manual start
Start vlc-daemon either from terminal:
/etc/init.d/vlc start
or using ACF and just klick [Start].
Make it start at next reboot
You might want to make it automatically start at next reboot
rc-update add vlc-daemon default
Debug
In case something goes wrong, consider looking at the logfiles.
less -I /var/log/vlc/vlc.log
If you don't find any useful information you could add verbosity by adding '-v' or '-vv' to /etc/conf.d/vlc and restart vlc (you would need to restart vlc-daemon to see more information in the logs).