One of the things I'd like to accomplish over the next few months is to migrate some or all of the live Air Mozilla video events to open formats. With Firefox 3.1 supporting Theora/Vorbis, it makes a lot of sense to start there.
I'm no video expert, and I've been relying on the easy to use proprietary systems that utilize proprietary desktop clients or plug-in based web clients to capture, decode/re-encode, and broadcast our streams. This means I really don't have a full grasp on how all this stuff works.
It shouldn't be too difficult. I hope.
Basically, what I need to do is grab the DV stream from my FireWire video camera with some app (what is that app? dvgrab?) and then pass that to ffmpeg2theora for decoding (does ffmpeg decode DV?) and re-encoding in Theora and finally pass that encoded data to a streaming server, probably IceCast.
Oh, and presumably some steps of this process are processor intensive so it may need to be spread across multiple machines. For example, I might need to capture on my laptop (since it can go where the camera can go) and pass off the stream to a beefier machine on our LAN for the decoding/re-encoding and then pass off to yet another machine for pushing the stream out to the world.
Simple!
But, I don't know how to do any of that. And! I don't even know if that's an accurate description of the solution.
If you know this stuff and want to help or can point me to any documentation, tutorials or other how-to content, I'd be very grateful.
Posted by: Mr Lizard | December 3, 2008 3:36 PM
I did my thesis on open source video sharing for one of Belgium's major universities. ffmpeg2theora was part of the workflow. You might find useful information at pwnt.be/thesis, where you can get the document in PDF.
Posted by: Tim | December 3, 2008 4:16 PM
what about using fluendo? as the streaming server?
Posted by: George Deka | December 3, 2008 4:29 PM
Flumotion will do this, check out http://www.flumotion.net/. It's included in most Linux distributions.
firewire -> DV -> ogg vorbis/theora -> http is supported and works well.
Posted by: Johan Dahlin | December 3, 2008 5:22 PM
You'll probably have to wait on a fix for https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=455654
Posted by: Justin Kerk | December 3, 2008 9:30 PM
Sorry if I missed the point of what you're trying to accomplish, but can't you use iMovie to capture the video from the camera, then export that direct to Theora?
I was under the impression theora exporting could be added to quicktime via a plug-in, and that iMovie will export to whatever quicktime can export to