Howto for IVTV capture cards

[lbcoder]

Its real fun that these cards aren't supported by zm yet, even after being around for quite a long time. I guess mpeg is not that easy to deal with.

Some solutions I've seen around involve ffmpeg for no better than a whopping 1 frame per second. Not good.


Here's another solution: vlc can perform transcoding and can stream mjpeg. Here's the line for vlc:

vlc -I "dummy" pvr:// :pvr-width=640 :pvr-height=480 --sout "#transcode{fps=10,vcodec=MJPG,vb=1500}:duplicate{dst=std{access=http,mux=mpjpeg,dst=:8080/file.jpg}" --sout-http-mime="multipart/x-mixed-replace;boundary=--7b3cc56e5f51db803f790dad720ed50a"

(note: you'll have to deal with your own boundary)

Note that I had a problem using the older packaged versions (0.8.6i) supplied by freshrpms OR livna, not sure if it is a bug in that version of vlc or just a bad package, but they would both crash on this line. With a freshly compiled version 0.9.1, works perfect.

If that's running, then you can just point zm to a remote host, localhost, on a port of 8080, with a path of /file.jpg, and at a resolution of 640x480. I have the frame rate set to 10 fps, though this can be adjusted.

The only downside to this approach is the CPU power that gets taken up by vlc for the transcoding... between 15 and 30% on a single-code AMD64-3200, though this is with a television input, so the motion is quite high. I haven't looked at using the ivtv yuv output yet, but it may help out a little.