Closed Circuit Video on Linux

[Duane Attaway]

On Thu, 27 Feb 2003, Jim Herrmann wrote:

> Give me some ideas on a technical solution.  Anyone interested in
> helping with this project as an interesting intellectual pursuit?  
> We're looking to move on the design of this project right away, with
> implementation coming just a few months from now.

I'm cheap, so I use the very cheap Hauppauge WinTV card.  It streams a
high quality, reliable NTSC video.  For viewing video or multiple webcams,
this is an excellent choice; however, if you want to edit and make movies,
this could be a joke.  If you need something to view a remote video feed,
it will work well:

The video4linux package has a couple of nice utilities for streaming the
video to disc or another machine.  I often would X forward the xawtv
viewer over a 2MB/s wireless link to watch television on my laptop around
the house.  There isn't much of a problem with using multiple video cards
for multiple streams.  The CPU isn't bothered by the video bandwidth, but
the DMA may quickly fill up the PCI bus with multiple streams.  It is also
possible to multiplex (switch) multiple cameras to a single card. Setting
up a simple system like this with linux has been very easy in my
experience.

The streamer utility is the command line version and can make short movies
or screenshots to your hard drive.  The reason why I say short movies, is
uncompressed video of the better quality has often exceeded the speed of
my disks and would fill up available memory within a minute.  I haven't
even tried the linux software video compression packages as a 120MHz CPU
might be an exercise in fustration.

Video editing is another story and the price of entry might be high:

I was helping a friend a couple days ago with his video editing system
(http://www.twohearts.biz).  He had problems editing, because the 8 drives
on his SCSI RAID array wasn't running at the full 80MB/sec, but 40MB/sec.  
A couple of new cables and a new terminator brought it back to 80MB/sec
and eliminated the errors.  He related his experience of pricing a new
turnkey video system locally starting around $65,000.  And you are likely 
to see Windows 2000.

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