Date: Wed, 30 Jun 1999 18:25:57 -0400 From: Randall Hopper <aa8vb@ipass.net> To: Frode Vatvedt Fjeld <frodef@acm.org> Cc: freebsd-multimedia@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Frode's vtv & libvideo Message-ID: <19990630182557.A5980@ipass.net> In-Reply-To: <2h6747s459.fsf@dslab7.cs.uit.no>; from Frode Vatvedt Fjeld on Tue, Jun 29, 1999 at 12:16:34PM %2B0200 References: <2hzp2tfr3t.fsf@dslab7.cs.uit.no> <374AA5BB.7C87D8C2@cs.strath.ac.uk> <2hogj9f0p6.fsf@dslab7.cs.uit.no> <2hpv2kba67.fsf@dslab7.cs.uit.no> <37777968.759F59E9@cs.strath.ac.uk> <19990628181900.A3087@ipass.net> <2h6747s459.fsf@dslab7.cs.uit.no>
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Frode Vatvedt Fjeld:
|Since this subject has come up, would you (and others here) like to
|have a look at my effort at an application architecture for tv/video?
|It's not quite release-ready, but has been working OK for me and a
|frew others for a while now.
|
|It's a C library with a Tcl/Tk interface (but I hope to add some lisp
|variant too), and currently one real application (i.e. tcl-script). There
|are are grabber drivers for bktr, meteor and V4L-1.
|
|If installed ("make install"), run the app as "vtv". It can be run
|in-place as "./videowish/videowish examples/vtv". The tuner settings can
|be edited in examples/dot.vtv.rc (this is where I need libtuner.. :) NTSC
|users probably need to edit this file to change default sizes.
Cool. I just pulled it.
Videolib 0.1.0 w/ vtv compiled and installed without a hitch. I hit a few
small glitches, but it works and is pretty cool!
Anyway, here's what I found: I discovered I needed the few config tweaks
you mentioned and a few others to work in NTSC-land (copying .vtv.rc from
your example, grabbing a frequency out of the brooktree848.c tables for the
channel_list, adding:
set current_tvnorm "NTSC/M"
and updating maxwidth and maxheight for NTSC.
Initially, I didn't tweak width and height, defaulting to PAL's 384x288 and
had lots of wavy black lines on the video window. This is a driver issue
though.
I changed width/height to 320 and 240, but the size ended up 320x224
(according to the vtv annotation), and the image window was completely
black -- sound but no image.
I changed width and height, started it up, and immediately got an error box
(it just said "Error:" -- no message).
I quit and started up again and got my image with wavy lines back. I
stretched the window and got a good solid video image.
Then I realized this was probably the grid feature kicking in, so I changed
that to 16 and set the width/height back to 320/240. That worked.
Then, resizing the window by hand, I got that "Error:" dialog with no image
in the video window. No amount of resizing would bring it back. Had to
quit and restart.
Sometimes resizing would cause the widget panel to disappear.
I guess Fps must be fields per second because it was showing up around 59
Fps for me in interlaced mode.
Also, I love to Ctrl-C apps. I found that vtv didn't clean up its shared
memory when I did this, so after 2 or 3 runs, it wouldn't run anymore until
I cleaned these up manually. Same thing happened when I killed it with the
Destroy window manager function.
Whenever I put it in scan mode or it was skipping across frequency bands
with no signal, it seemed to really slow the X server GUI down (like it was
pushing a lot more images than normal or the driver was eating some serious
CPU). When this happened, the XPerfmon++ System CPU load went way up to
90% and stayed there (normally it's 0-1%, even when vtv is running and
blasting video on the screen).
Once I got it configured though and quit resizing it manually, it worked
pretty well. Good to see another FreeBSD TV app out there! :-)
--------------------
I've also been playing with a scripted driver interface for writing TV apps
(using Python and Tk for the GUI). Though you're much farther along than I
am. Looks good!
IMO, C, compiling, and X programming are 3 of the bigger obstacles to Joe
User going hog wild writing their own multimedia GUI apps. A scripted
interface (with their simpler syntax, interpreted execution, and more
programmable GUIs) largely side-steps these problems. One day when they're
ready we should check some of these useful scripting tools into the ports
tree.
Randall
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