Comments

Thursday 01, January 01:33

Stree-e-e-e-eam. Stream stream stree-eeem.

Made good progress :)

House and garage is now wired with Cat5 ready for camera server to sit in garage

Linux installed and configured. After a couple of days of tinkering I finally got a video image out of my grabber card. However, there was fairly significant corruption with the image (This is via XawTV):

Yet more fiddling, tweaking, research and trawling through the images at The BTTV gallery later, I discovered that my card was NOT a Kodicom clone at all, but rather a Tibet Systems "Progress DVR". Manually setting the card type in the BTTV driver brought forth perfect video! Wahooo!

This is great news in two respects. 1) Linux supports the card properly and openly instead of the crappy proprietory drivers I had with Windows, and 2) I didn't fry the card with my dodgy wiring! :)

After spending 2 HOURS trying to download and install VideoLAN (Who said Linux was easy? ;)), and much more fiddling and tweaking, I finally had video streaming over the LAN to my Windows box. Hallelujah!

I have since been spending more time testing codecs to try and determine the best way forward. I still think MJPEG is the way to go, so now am looking at how best to present this in people's browsers. According to my research, Mozilla based browsers should be able to support this natively, but when I tested I only get the current image in the stream displayed. Any ideas anyone?

For MS or IE based people, I think I will provide a choice of a java plugin, or an Active-X control. Java would be preferable but of course not everyone has that since MS stopped shipping it with Windows. Active-X is the option for these people, and I plan to nick the Axis camera control for this purpose.

I have toyed with using Javascript to update the JPEG too, but I doubt this will update fast enough (30 frames per second). May have this as a fallback though. We will see.

So there you go, that's the current status. I hope to have at least one camera up and online by the end of the weekend. Watch this space! :D

Guest      2007-11-25 03:13:03

Guest      2007-11-25 03:13:26