[hackerspaces] What's your recording setup?

[Marc Juul]

On Sat, Feb 12, 2011 at 4:41 AM, Hans Fraiponts <fraiponts at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi, for my local hackerspace I'd like to record talks.
> I have a few usb webcams, a microphone and a computer.
> I'd like to be able to switch between cams, set the audio to
> microphone and I'd like the output to be recorded to harddrive.
> Just like the professionals ;-)
> Does anyone know an open source toolchain that would allow me to do so?

Like others have said, the easiest thing right now is probably to use
something like dvgrab + dvswitch to grab the video and do the live
mixing, run it through ffmpeg for encoding and have ffmpeg encode it
to the format you want.

If you want to do live streaming for the web you can then use oggfwd +
icecast2 for HTML5 video, or simply ffmpeg tcp connection to RTMPd
with e.g. FlowPlayer on the client side for Flash video.

This works fine if you have a dv firewire connection to you camera.
You can probably also use ffmpeg to pull from a webcam, encode to DV
format and then give that to dvswitch. If you want HD video, then you
might get lucky and find a camera that outputs HDV (which dvgrab can
understand), but most camcorders output either HDMI or SDI, which will
require a capture card. BlackMagic sells PCI Express HDMI/SDI capture
cards with Linux drivers, but I haven't tried those myself, and the
license agreement for their SDK isn't that friendly.

As far as I can tell, it is not possible to capture live video from an
HDMI or SDI source on a laptop running Linux. I could actually really
use some input if anyone has ideas for how to do this.

-- 
Marc Juul