Wednesday, October 11, 2006

exporting HD content to the cam: IT IS ALIIIIVE!! ALIVE!!

After a month of testing and experimentation with many inter-OS softwares, exporting HD content to my camera is working! YAHOO!! The greatest part is..I am Microsoft FREE!

Most of my work was based off of this original thread:
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/archive/index.php/t-19007.html

But a number of steps (ffmpeg/DVHSCap) did not work for me.

Here are the steps I used to get HD content from Cinelerra back to my cam in full resolution, HD 720P format:

1) install the latest 2.6.18 kernel according to specs on http://www.linux1394.org
2) you'll need the latest libiec61883 and libraw1394 libraries from the same place . I needed to manually tweak the ./configure procedure for libiec61883 with the following environment variable:
PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkconfig
Another caveat to this step is that I needed to remove libraw1394 first, which was a nightmare because of all its dependencies. I created a yum install script to reinstall everything after this was complete.
3) you'll need to make a change to tsbuffer.c and recompile libiec61883 (don't have it now..email me if you need it).
4) you'll need to recompile mpeg2enc to allow for bitrates larger than 14000. This is referenced in the thread from way back when:
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/archive/index.php/t-19007.html
--------------------
A kludgy hack allowed me to get bit rates higher than 15Mbs in mpeg2enc

I removed the following lines from conform.cc
if (bit_rate> 1.0e6 * maxval->bit_rate)
mjpeg_error_exit1("Bit rate is greater than permitted in specified Level");
---------------------
5) here are the mpeg2enc switches that were successful for me:
mpeg2enc --verbose 0 --aspect 3 --format 3 --frame-rate 4 --video-bitrate 18300 --nonvideo-bitrate 384 --interlace-mode 0 --force-b-b-p --video-buffer 448 --video-norm n --keep-hf --no-constraints --sequence-header-every-gop --min-gop-size 6 --max-gop-size 6 -o mpeg2.mpv
6) mplex params:
mplex -f 3 -b 2000 -o programstream.ps audio.mp2 mpeg2.mpv
7) Use VLC to convert the file to a transport stream. By the way, the VLC is a hellish snake pit of install dependencies. Go to http://www.videolan.org to download the latest source.

Here are the instructions for VLC from Paul St. Denis' original steps (http://www.celt.sunysb.edu/paul/mpeg2enc_HDTV.zip):
------------------
Start VLC, from the "file" menu select "open file", click on the "Browse..." button and find "programstream.ps", check on the "advanced output" check box and then click on the "Settings.." button. Make sure the "file" radio button is picked click on the "Browse..." button save the file on your desktop as "transport.ts".

Make sure that the "Encapsulation Method" is MPEG TS, leave everything else blank. Click OK, which brings you back to the other screen click OK again.
------------------

Yes, it's a lot of work. But to be Microsoft free is a great feeling.

Update: as of this writing (10/17), I'm only able to upload less than 2GB of video. For my 720P video cam, this is about 19.7 minutes of video. I am working with the linux1394 community to resolve this.

No comments: