Stream a DV-camera using vlc

This material is work-in-progress ... Do not follow instructions here until this notice is removed. (Last edited by Zcrayfish on 20 Dec 2021.)

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

Note: If you intend to use a desktop environment with vlc you will need to install vlc-qt in order to get that working.
vlc-dev or vlc package does not contain the graphical part of vlc (menus etc.).

Todo: I haven't figured out why vlc-dev is needed. Manually adding all vlc-dev dependencies does not work.
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

Tip: A easy way to control vlc-daemon would be through ACF. Consider following these simple steps.
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).