I’ve already covered how to do this with vlc a while back in parts 1 followed by part 2. I just found out that something very similar in results can be done with ffmpeg. ffmpeg has recently added support for directshow filters which now allows one to capture the screen and stream and/or save it. Here is how you can do this:

1.) Grab a copy of the Screen Capture DirectShow source filter from Unreal Streaming Technologies. It’s about half way down that page. They have both the UScreenCapture X86 Edition and the X64 Edition (depending on your OS installation). I used the 64 bit filter on a Windows 7 64 bit installation.

2.) Install the filter and make sure you make the following changes to your windows registry using regedit. The default frame rate for UScreenCapture filter is 10 f/s and we need to boost this to 30 frames/sec. You need to find the key HKLM\SOFTWARE\UNREAL\Live\UScreenCapture and insert a DWORD value of 30 for FrameRate (You have to create FrameRate, it does not exist by default). Once you’ve done the registry tweak, reboot.

3.) Install the latest greatest version of ffmpeg for your windows version from Zeranoe. I grabbed the 64 bit Static build since I didn’t want to deal with libraries and such. Extract it and stick it somewhere on your hard drive. Remember the path to this folder since we will need it later.

4.) Open a command line window and cd to the directory where you extracted ffmpeg into, find the bin directory and cd into it. This is were the ffmpeg executable resides. In my case (I extracted the ffmpeg files into “Program Files” directory) it is C:\Program Files\ffmpeg-git-059707e-win64-static\bin.

5.) If you’ve made it this far, hand in there, we’re almost home. Now you need to issue the command that gets the screen streaming going. But first we need to find out the name of the Screen filter device. So issue the following command:

ffmpeg -list_devices true -f dshow -i dummy

In the output look for a device called “UScreenCapture“. Hopefully if everything is working with the directshow filter you have a entry in the list. That’s the name of our device that we need to pass onto ffmpeg. While you’re there also look for your audio device entry as well. Mine was the truncated word “Stereo Mix (Realtek High Defini” (Yes mine was missing the end of that line). Jot that down somewhere as well. I will show you how to get audio going as well.

6.) So first step is to get video going. Assuming you have a “UScreenCapture” device (You could use another directshow filter if you like, this will work with most of them. I just used the Unreal filter for the heck of it), here is the command to start encoding and sending video:

ffmpeg -f dshow  -i video="UScreenCapture"  -r 30 -vcodec mpeg4 -q 12 -f mpegts udp://aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd:6666?pkt_size=188?buffer_size=65535

• -f dshow specifies that you’re going to be using a directshow device as your input.
• -i video=”UScreenCapture” is the name of the input directshow device which we picked up in step 5.
• -r 30 is the frame rate.
• -vcodec mpeg4 is our video codec of choice.
• -q 12 is a quality measure for the encoding process (1 is the best and 30 the worst). We’re doing VBR encoding so this measures the compression ratio vs. picture quality.
• -f mpegts is our output filetype. In this case mpeg-2 transport stream. Yes, we’re encapsulating mpeg4 video inside a mpeg-2 transport stream…..why?….google it.
• udp://aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd:6666?pkt_size=188?buffer_size=65535 this last bit specifies the address and port number of the recipient machine (aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd is the ip address of that machine and 6666 is my arbitrary port number). We’re also instructing ffmpeg to create smaller 188 byte size udp packets (which is the size of the transport stream packets) to decrease latency and our buffer size is 64kb.

7.) On the receiving machine you should be able to use vlc, ffmpeg or mplayer to catch the stream. In vlc simply open the Network stream rtp://@:6666 , in ffmpeg you can use the command ffplay -i udp://:6666 or using mplayer you can issue the command mplayer -framedrop -double udp://:6666 .

8.) Now to optionally add sound to the whole thing we can use this command on the encoding machine (instead of step 6). You need to know the device name for your sound card and you probably want to turn the volume down (at least initially) on the decoding machine.

ffmpeg -f dshow  -i video="UScreenCapture" -f dshow -i audio="Stereo Mix (Realtek High Defini" -r 30 -vcodec mpeg4 -q 20 -acodec libmp3lame -ab 128k -f mpegts udp://141.117.224.74:6666?pkt_size=188?buffer_size=65535

• -f dshow specifies that you’re going to be using a directshow device as your input (VIDEO).
• -i video=”UScreenCapture” is the name of the input directshow video device which we picked up in step 5.
• -f dshow specifies that you’re going to be using a directshow device as your input (AUDIO).
• -i audio=”Stereo Mix (Realtek High Defini” is the name of the input directshow audio device which we picked up in step 5.
• -r 30 is the frame rate.
• -vcodec mpeg4 is our video codec of choice.
• -q 20 is a quality measure for the encoding process (1 is the best and 30 the worst). We’re doing VBR encoding so this measures the compression ratio vs. picture quality. I went with 20 instead of 12 from step 6 since the audio encoding slows the machine down a bit.
• -acodec libmp3lame is our video codec of choice
• -f mpegts is our output filetype. In this case mpeg-2 transport stream. Yes, we’re encapsulating mpeg4 video inside a mpeg-2 transport stream…..why?….google it.
• udp://aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd:6666?pkt_size=188?buffer_size=65535 this last bit specifies the address and port number of the recipient machine (aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd is the ip address of that machine and 6666 is my arbitrary port number). We’re also instructing ffmpeg to create smaller 188 byte size udp packets (which is the size of the transport stream packets) to decrease latency and our buffer size is 64kb.

In this guide I’ll show you how to stream live HDV/DV video to your iphone using a linux box (Ubuntu 9.10) with firewire input running vlc/ffmpeg and a Imac with OSX 10.6.2 running mediastreamsegmenter and apache2.

Start out with the iPhone streaming media overview. Without understanding this document you’ll have a hard time getting things working.

First things first, you need to have a working Ubuntu 9.10 machine. I’m using a small footprint 2.4Ghz Core2Duo machine with PCI firewire 400 card in it. For video input I’m using a Canon HV30 set to HDV mode (1080i/60) connected via firewire.

Next you need to follow the instructions on this page (steps 0-5) to get a working ffmpeg with x264 and aac encoding. Without this working you’re not going anywhere….sorry. If you’re trying this on a different Ubuntu installation follow the other links to get a working ffmpeg setup.

Then install vlc using “sudo apt-get install vlc“. I used vlc as my encoder frontend as I understand it better than ffmpeg. You can use just straight ffmpeg as well if you can figure out how to get it to encode the live HDV stream over firewire.

You’ll also need dvgrab utility. Install it using “sudo apt-get install dvgrab“.

Now we want to make sure the internal firewire module is working so type this command and see if you get a vlc window with the camera output in it (make sure you turn the camera ON and hook it up first).
sudo dvgrab -f hdv -noavc -nostop -|vlc -
You have to use sudo under ubuntu to get proper access to the firewire device. The above command runs dvgrab with hdv format and makes sure that 1394 AV/Device control is turned off (this way you can be in Camera mode and get a live feed). The nostop switch prevents dvgrab from sending stop commands to the camera everytime you stop it via Ctrl-C, which I though was a good thing. The last dash forces dvgrab to output to stdout, which we’ll then pipe into vlc (the dash for vlc tells it to use stdin as input).

Next we need to create a media stream out of our linux box and ship it over UDP to the Imac. The vlc command below gets the job done. Remember you’re sudo’ing and need to provide the password after you enter the command.
sudo dvgrab -f hdv -noavc -nostop -|vlc - --sout '#transcode{vcodec=h264,vb=256,venc=x264{aud,profile=baseline,level=30,keyint=30,bframes=0,ref=1,nocabac},acodec=mp4a,ab=64,scale=0.25,deinterlace,width=320,height=240}:duplicate{dst=std{access=udp,mux=ts,dst=192.168.1.97:1234}}'
The IP address toward the end of the command is the IP of the Imac machine receiving the stream. Port 1234 is arbitrary. The stream is comprised of h.264 video @ 256K and AAC audio @ 64K. Those elementary streams are then packaged in mpeg2 transport stream before being shipped to the Imac. This is the standard way of doing HTML5 video (from what I understand).

So now we can go over to the mac and see if we receive the video stream. For that just run VLC for OSX and open UDP network port on port 1234 (udp://). If things are working nicely you should see a 320×240 video from you HDV camera on the Imac.

Now that we have the video on the mac, we need to use the “mediastreamsegmenter” command line tool to create HTML5 video stream out of it. mediastreamsegmenter listens on a UDP port for incoming transport stream chops it (by default) into 10 sec. “mini” transport stream files and writes these mini files to wherever you tell it. This location is important since it needs to be accessible to your webserver. Remember, at the end of the chain (day), the webserver is doing all the heavy lifting of delivering the mini transport stream files to your iphone. mediastreamsegmenter also produces a file of type .m3u8
which is basically a live updated playlist.

Something you might not know is that apple ships standard OSX with apache builtin. All you have to do is use the following command to get it started.
apachectl start
Now point your browser on the mac to localhost and see if it loads a page. Now that apache is working we need to modify it so it knows how to deal with .ts and .m3u8 files. This involves adding a couple of lines to /etc/apache2/httpd.conf
AddType application/x-mpegURL .m3u8
AddType video/MP2T .ts
and /etc/apache2/mime.types
.m3u8 application/x-mpegURL
.ts video/MP2T
Next we need to restart apache
apachectl restart
By default OSX apache is setup to load it’s documents from /Library/WebServer/Documents, so I created a directory called “stream” to contain the media stuff (.ts files and .m3u8 file) and put the following into the index.html file in /Library/WebServer/Documents.
<html>
<head>
<title>Video Test</title>
<meta name="viewport" content="width=320; initial-scale=1.0; maximum-scale=1.0; user-scalable=0;"/>
</head>
<body style="background-color:#FFFFFF; ">
<center>
<video width='320' height='240' src="prog_index.m3u8" controls autoplay> </video>
</center>
</body>
</html>

Now that we’ve got all the prep done on the mac, we issue the following command from terminal window to get the mediastreamsegmenter going (details can be found by using man mediastreamsegmenter).
mediastreamsegmenter -b http://192.168.1.97/stream -f /Library/WebServer/Documents/stream 192.168.1.64:1234
Here -b specifies the base of the URL that will be encoded into the .m3u8 file (this is the IP address of your Imac, stream is the folder in /Library/WebServer/Documents/ where the mini .ts files and the .m3u8 file are). The -f switch specifies the output directory for the mini .ts files and the .m3u8 file. and the last IP address:port is from your Linux box.

Now you should be able to open up your browser on your iphone/ipod touch and punch in http://192.168.1.97 (assuming the Imac is reachable from your phone) and see the streaming video (You might have to turn on “Plugins” feature under settings/safari on your device. Mine was turned off and drove me crazy until I figured it out). If Plugins is turned off, the index.html page will load, but no video.

Hopefully there is enough meat here to get you guys started……btw. I hear the following command (or variations of) can be used on linux side (instead of vlc). I haven’t tried it and can’t confirm if it works.
ffmpeg -i <in file> -f mpegts -acodec libmp3lame -ar 48000 -ab 64k -s 320×240 -vcodec libx264 -b 96k -flags +loop -cmp +chroma -partitions +parti4×4+partp8×8+partb8×8 -subq 5 -trellis 1 -refs 1 -coder 0 -me_range 16 -keyint_min 25 -sc_threshold 40 -i_qfactor 0.71 -bt 200k -maxrate 96k -bufsize 96k -rc_eq 'blurCplx^(1-qComp)' -qcomp 0.6 -qmin 10 -qmax 51 -qdiff 4 -level 30 -aspect 320:240 -g 30 -async 2 <output file>

Some excellent information can be found on Carson McDonald’s blog:

• iPhone HTTP Streaming with FFMpeg and an Open Source Segmenter
• iPhone Windowed HTTP Live Streaming Using Amazon S3 and Cloudfront Proof of Concept
• HTTP Live Video Stream Segmenter and Distributor

The answer to that is maybe, we’ll see. But all that aside if you’re interested in a minimalistic video player that can handle more codecs than VLC and is generally faster then give Movist a try.

The unique thing about the player is that it allows you to switch codec engines between ffmpeg and quicktime based on file extensions. Oh and did I say it’s FREE aswell .

Well, it’s taken a bit of time, but I think with the announcement of DP1.2 specs last December, the specs (and hopefully soon the vendors) are ready for True Digital Cinema home implementation. The DisplayPort connector supports 1, 2, or 4 data pairs in a main link that also carries clock and optional audio signals, each with a symbol rate of 1.62, 2.7, or 5.4 Gbit/s. The video signal path supports 6 to 16 bits per color channel. This allows the updated DisplayPort 1.2 specification to drive 4K x 2K display (3840×2160) with 30 bits per pixel and 3D over a single 2m cable.

DP 1.2 supports a maximum of 5.4Gbps per lane, with 4 lanes providing a whopping 21.6Gbps throughput, more than enough for 10-bit 4xHD resolution (3840×2160). To achieve the 21.6 Gbps rate, the per-lane data rate is doubled from 2.7 Gbps to 5.4 Gbps max, over the four lanes that exist in the standard cable. For a single display, this enables up to 3840 x 2400 maximum resolution at 60Hz, or a 3D display (120Hz) at 2560 x 1600.

Display Port 1.2′s massive data rate will enable Multiple-Streaming, support for stereoscopic images beyond full HD, a high-speed data channel, and support for mini connectors.

Multi-Streaming — is the ability to transport multiple independent uncompressed display and audio streams over a single cable. This enables the use of multiple monitors connected by cable in a daisy chain or hub configuration. Whereas the current Display v1.1a standard can support one 2560 x 1600 monitor at 60Hz, DisplayPort v1.2 can support two such monitors with one port, or four 1920 x 1200 monitors.

Another new feature is the ability to support high-speed, bi-directional data transfer, allowing USB 2.0 or Ethernet data to be carried within a standard DisplayPort cable. For DisplayPort v1.2, the maximum data rate of this “AUX” channel has been increased from 1 Mbps (Mega-bit-per-second) to 720 Mbps, providing suitable bandwidth for USB 2.0. The DisplayPort cable can therefore support USB data to/from the display to support Display USB functions, in addition to sending the video and audio information. Standard Ethernet can also be transported in the DisplayPort cable.

On the audio front DisplayPort v1.2 adds the following new enhancements:

• Audio Copy Protection and category codes
• High definition audio formats such as Dolby MAT, DTS HD, all Blu-Ray formats, and the DRA standard from China
• Synchronization assist between audio and video, multiple audio channels, and multiple audio sink devices using Global Time Code (GTC)

DisplayPort v1.2 also includes improved support for Full HD 3D Stereoscopic displays:

• Life-like motion using up to 240 frames-per-second in full HD, providing 120 frames-per-second for each eye
• 3D Stereo transmission format support 
• Field sequential
• Side by side
• Pixel interleaved
• Dual interface
• Stacked
• 3D Stereo display capability declaration
• Mono
• Stereo
• 3D Glasses

The only thing on my wish-list that they (VESA) omitted is support for true 4K DCinema (4096×2048) resolution. But I guess you can’t have everything……and there is always DP1.3 .

For those of you who don’t know OpenShot Video Editor(TM) is an open-source program that creates, modifies, and edits video files. OpenShot provides extensive editing and compositing features, and has been designed as a practical tool for working with high-definition video including HDV and AVCHD.

Jonathan Thomas and crew have reached their 1.0 milestone (congrats ). The program is rock solid and is running beautifully on my Ubuntu 9.10 installation.

OpenShot’s Features include:

• Support for many video, audio, and image formats (based on FFmpeg)
• Gnome integration (drag and drop support)
• Multiple tracks
• Clip resizing, trimming, snapping, and cutting
• Video transitions with real-time previews
• Compositing, image overlays, watermarks
• Title templates, title creation
• SVG friendly, to create and include titles and credits
• Scrolling motion picture credits
• Solid color clips (including alpha compositing)
• Support for Rotoscoping / Image sequences
• Drag and drop timeline
• Frame stepping, key-mappings: J,K, and L keys
• Video encoding (based on FFmpeg)
• Key Frame animation
• Digital zooming of video clips
• Speed changes on clips (slow motion etc)
• Custom transition lumas and masks
• Re-sizing of clips (frame size)
• Audio mixing and editing
• Presets for key frame animations and layout
• Ken Burns effect (making video by panning over an image)
• Digital video effects, including brightness, gamma, hue, greyscale, chroma key (bluescreen/greenscreen), and over 20 other video effects.

Neato!!!!

I usually don’t tend to write about apps, but this one got my attention. Download the FREE NFB app and you get access to over a thousand films, documentaries, animations and trailers on your IPhone or Ipod Touch. I think (hope) that this move will be the trickle before the storm that will finally open the flood gates of media archives being made available to people everywhere. It is a real shame that these works are usually housed/guarded in some concrete bunker, being only available to specialists. I will not bore you with my opinions on archives/copyrights/rights management of our collective cultural treasures by the “high priests”……Let’s just say I’m crawling out of my skin in joy that NFB has taken the (hopefully) first step .

I love the Samson guys, they introduce a product, listen to the customers, improve the product and release it at a more affordable price. Q3 is their latest creation and it goes straight after all you pod/vod casters out there. Need to do a interview, gotta have good video….and need to have the best sound, well if you’ve got $250 bucks then Q3 is your friend. The Q3 Handy Video Recorder brings Samsons renowned audio technology to the camcorder, making it the best sounding video camcorder you’ve ever heard. So throw away your Creative Vado/Flip HD gadget and step up to video with “Real” sound. After all “Apocalypse Now” still looks good on VHS ’cause it had kick ass audio.

The Q3 uses the same microphone capsules as our industry-leading H4n Handy Recorder and is perfect for recording anything where great audio and video are a must. From live musical performances and rehearsals, interviews, conferences to video podcasts, journalism, education, recitals, weddings or sports, the Q3′s pristine audio quality takes your videos to another level.

The Q3 puts a little bit of video and a whole lot of audio together in one quick and easy to use camcorder that lets you produce great movies on the go.

Features:

• Built-in stereo condenser microphones with X/Y configuration for true stereo imaging
• Get up to 1 hour of video with bundled 2GB SD card
• Accepts up to a 32GB SDHC card for 16 hours of recording time
• Large 2.4″ LCD display with a resolution of 320 x 240
• Video resolution of 640 x 480 at 30 frames/sec
• Video Format: MPEG-4 SP
• NTSC / PAL TV output
• Optics Lens Type: Fixed Focus (0.8m to infinity)
• Audio formats with video include 44.1/48kHz 16/24-bit Linear PCM WAV or MP3 up to 320kbps
• Audio only formats include 96kHz 16/24-bit Linear PCM WAV
• Auto Record Level automatically adjusts audio levels during recordings
• Uses two standard AA batteries or NiMH rechargeable batteries
• USB 2.0 with built-in cable
• Windows and Mac OS compatible
• Built-in speaker and tripod mount
• Includes on-board editing software, YouTube uploader software, Apple Quicktime, TV cable, softcase, windscreen, 2GB SD card, two AA Batteries

I came across The Basics’ “With this ship” video this morning and  I figured I had to share it. Great music and a fantastic video created by Aussie director and animator Matt Arnold.

Great video showing a bizarre and novel way of creating a gesture based interface. You literally touch nothing….Air…..and the interface does the rest. Pretty interesting project. According to Justin Schunick of the team at Northeastern University, the interface uses an array of copper electrodes to sense a certain change in the electric field created by the device. The black material covering the electrodes shows how the interface can be hidden beneath surfaces to create a completely invisible interface. It is simple black felt you can buy at any fabric store. The total cost of this prototype was around $60.00 USD.

They created custom software to communicate with the microcontroller running the show with C++. This enables the use of the device as a new type of XYZ computer mouse. Think nintendo wii controller without the controller — or minority report without the gloves. This can potentially be revolutionary as far as HCI goes.

Came across this video today and my first thought was…..magic??….Hmmm…..gotta be a video editing trickbut once I watched it for the fourth time it slowly started to click. This is by far the most innovative use of AR I’ve seen…..It’s fascinating…..It’s Magic . Watch Marco Tempest do his thing in this video….be warned though…you might have to watch it a couple of times…..it’s addictive. Lots of behind the scenes pictures here.

It’s called Subprime and is an animated musing on our current financial crisis. The tag line is: “Watch the American housing market spiral out of control”. Really cool….

Adam Savage talks about obsessions at TED….absolutely fascinating.

If you like Quartz Composer and are into VJ/Visual software, CoGe might just be for you. It’s got clip triggering, effects, mixing and playback modules. Check out the CoGe forums for more info…..For now here is a “Intro to CoGe 0.85b” and “What’s New in 0.93b release” videos:

Have Fun!!!

I’ve always had problems with this and now really appreciate the value of DMS (DivXLand Media Subtitler). You see I own a small HD media player that’s connected to my TV. The trouble with this little gadget is that it does not support subtitle files. That’s not a problem anymore since DMS allows me to embed the subtitles into the Divx/Xvid file before I watch it.

DivXLand Media Subtitler key features:

* Create subtitle files from plain text files
* Preview subtitled video immediately without saving file
* Save partially edited files to resume subtitling process later
* Automatic caption timing features
* Multiple subtitling modes available
* Support for basic text formatting
* Support for at least 30 subtitle formats (open and save)
* Keyboard shortcuts available to control subtitle process
* Spell check using the Ms Word component
* Embed subtitles on AVI video
* Extract audio streams from AVI and MPG videos into MP2, MP3 and WAV formats
* Check for product updates directly from Help menu
* Quick Start Guide in several languages included as PDF and online
* Support for all East Asian and Right-to-Left languages; more info

Subtitle formats currently supported:

Adobe Encore ● Advanced SubStation Alpha ● CSV (Excel) ● DKS ● DVD Subtitle System ● DVD Subtitle ● FAB Subtitler ● JACOSub 2.7 ● Karaoke LRC ● MacSUB ● Mac DVD Studio Pro ● MicroDVD ● MPlayer ● OVR Script ● Pinnacle Impression ● PowerDivx ● PowerPixel ● QuickTime Text ● RealTime ● SAMI ● SonicDVD ● Sonic Scenarist ● Spruce DVD Maestro ● Spruce Subtitle ● SubRip ● SubStation Alpha ● SubViewer 1.0 ● SubViewer 2.0 ● Tabbed values (generic) ● TMPlayer ● TurboTitler ● Ulead DVD Workshop ● ViPlay ● ZeroG

Fantastic windows only application and free to download.

For those of you who’ve hated the opensource ffmpeg command line media conversion tool, here is Quick Media Converter. It’s a nice looking front-end for ffmpeg that hides the command line complexity of this swiss army like media converter. So What can you do with Quick Media Converter?

-Converting Video files from one format to another.
-Converting Audio files from one format to another.
-Extracting and converting Audio files from video or audio media.
-Extracting and converting Video without sound.
-Preview and/or listen to video and audio files with FFPLAY Multi format player (Fabrice Bellard).
- A myriad of formats is recognized by FFmpeg, those not recognized yet, are worked on by many people around the open source community and may most of the time, become available sooner or later.
-Many files to convert? No worry, batch files processing is also supported by QMC.
-You are lazy by nature and do not wish to start selecting files? That’s okay just drag and drop the files in the active worksheet.
-You have more specific needs and want to experiment with video and audio conversion, you can do so by using our Expert mode section.
-You want to capture a movie or picture directly from your webcam or DV Cam, just click on the webcam button and start capturing in raw flux or avi divx , after this is done the software will offer you to convert your file to other formats.
-You want to make a tutorial or capture your latest performance in your favorite video game? just click on Camstudio (open source) start recording and add comments on your avi divx movie output.

-Access our support forum directly from our application to get help, we usually respond to your questions within one day or two. We do not support expert mode in general as by essence if you use it you are considered an expert user.

It’s a Windows only utility and is free to download.

More crazy image-enhanced video rendering papers from University of Washington being presented at Siggraph08. I just can’t get enough of these new applications of combining crappy video and some still frames to produce eye popping results. Most of the experiments in this video were done using a standard video camera and a hi-res still camera. The results were combined, some secret sauce added and you end up with these killer results. I for one can’t wait for editing packages to include some of these research topics as new features….Can you say UNREAL

This brand new Kraak and Smaak video is just too cool. Makes me want to do some flipbooking of my own. Great visuals and well fantastic music to boot…..enjoy .

Well kids are you ready for todays lesson in transcoding DV video. So first you need a decent machine. I’m using a P4 2.4Ghz oldie that has Firewire on-board and am chewing up 50% CPU for NTSC encoding. Then you need to get Ubuntu 8.04 installed. Once that’s done use the following command to install vlc (Video Lan Client):
sudo apt-get install vlc
Then either follow this guide or if you’re using 8.04 (Hardy Heron) ONLY, use the following command to add Medibuntu to your repository sources.list:
sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/hardy.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list
followed by
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get update
to add the GPG key for Medibuntu Repository. You may be asked to accept this package even though it cannot be authenticated. This is normal; typing “Yes” means you trust Medibuntu.
Now do the following commands to get libdvdcss and other codecs installed on your machine:
sudo apt-get install libdvdcss2
sudo apt-get install w32codecs (for i386 architecture) OR
sudo apt-get install w64codecs (for amd64 architecture)
Now that we have all the goodies installed and ready to go you can go ahead and connect that DV camera to your Ubuntu box using Firewire. Make sure it’s in Camera mode (NOT VCR) and open up a command line and type in the following command to get the encoder setup:
sudo -i (This will put you in superuser mode.....ie: root account)
cat /dev/dv1394/0 | vlc - :demux=rawdv -I dummy --sout '#transcode{vcodec=mp4v,vb=1024,acodec=mpga,ab=192,scale=1,width=720,height=480}:duplicate{dst=std{access=udp,mux=ts,dst=IPAddressofDestinationMachine:PortNumber}}'
You could also run the above command from your user account by adding sudo infront of it and supply your password followed by Enter key.

The above command (in case you’re wondering) will literally open device zero on the firewire chain and redirect it’s raw output into the VLC program. VLC is told to accept input from a pipe in rawdv format and to transcode it to mpeg4 Video @ 1Mb/s with mpeg1-layer3 audio @ 192 Kb/s.

Once the above command is running you’ll need to go to your receiving machine (the machine who’s IP you supplied in the command above), run VLC and from the File menu choose “Open Network Stream” and go with the default UDP/RTP on port 1234 (or whatever port you chose in the encoder command line).

Another neat thing you can do with your new found opensource goody bag is capture DV from your camera/settop box and save it in mpeg4 format for archival purposes (or mpeg2 for editing maybe). I’m not gonna get into the details, but assuming you’ve done the above commands, skip the encoder command and issue the following command to get your DV stream saved:
sudo -i
cat /dev/dv1394/0 | ffmpeg -f dv -i - -f mp4 -s 720x480 -vcodec mpeg4 -acodec aac -ab 128 -ar 44100 -deinterlace -b 3000k -y yourfilename.mp4
This command will take rawdv from the camera, pass it to ffmpeg, which will chew on it and spit it out as mpeg4 video @ 3Mb/s with AAC audio @ 128Kb/s into a file named yourfilename.mp4 (if the file exists it will overwrite it). Stopping is accomplished by CTRL-C. More info on this command can be found on ffmpeg’s man page.

Have Fun….