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 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….

A lot of people seem to be having problems (issues) with the original way I had proposed here using command line. So, I figured I make it real simple and do a graphical tutorial with screen shots to boot . In this example we first deal with the server (running windows) at IP address 192.168.1.1, then we move to our client (Mac OSX) at IP address 192.168.1.2 and view the servers screen remotely through streaming video. So first on the server (remember 192.168.1.1 is the IP address):

1) Bring up VLC and select File/Open Capture Device (Ctrl-A). You should see this screen modify the bottom portion (Advanced Options), so it looks like this picture below. You can decrease screen-fps to 15 if you like to speed things up a bit.

2) On that same screen Click on the Settings… button beside Stream/Save and you’ll see the following screen. Make sure it’s configured this way if you want to do the streaming through HTTP protocol. Audio Codec does not need to be checked, since there is no audio, I just put it in as habit. Note the Address field is the IP address of the same machine (the server in this case), which is 192.168.1.1. This can be a bit confusing.
3) Press Okay twice and your VLC server is up and running serving your desktop to whoever wants to watch (Note: This WILL slow down your server machine considerably).
4) Go to your client machine (192.168.1.2 in our case), run VLC and go to File/Open Network menu option and fill it in as follows. Note that we’re connecting to our server at 192.168.1.1 now.
5) Press okay and you should see the stream from your server now…..DONE!!

A buddy of mine (thanks Mike) showed me this today. There is a input Access module in the newer versions of VLC (0.8.6+) called “screen” which makes this possible. To stream your desktop to another machine (ip address: 192.168.1.2 in this case) just use the following command in Linux (sorry command line only):vlc screen:// :screen-fps=30 :screen-caching=100 --sout '#transcode{vcodec=mp4v,vb=4096,acodec=mpga,ab=256,scale=1,width=1280,height=800}:rtp{dst=192.168.1.2,port=1234,access=udp,mux=ts}'or in Windows (slightly different syntax) use this command:vlc screen:// :screen-fps=30 :screen-caching=100 :sout=#transcode{vcodec=mp4v,vb=2048,scale=1,acodec=mpga,ab=192,channels=2}:duplicate{dst=std{access=rtp,mux=ts,dst=192.168.1.1:1234}}This is one massive command, so lets take a look at it in more detail:

• screen:// is our input module selection (if you just run vlc screen:// you’ll see your own screen on the server inside vlc….kinda cool)
• :screen-fps=30 specifies that we want to screengrab at 30 fps (from default 5 fps)
• :screen-caching=100 sets the internal caching to 100ms (from default 300 ms)
• –sout is our output chain.
• #transcode tells vlc that we first want to transcode the input using parameters to follow
• {} contains our transcoding parameters
• vcodec=mp4v sets the video codec to mpeg4 video
• vb=4096 sets the bitrate of the transcoded video (4Mb/s)
• acodec=mpga sets the audio codec to mpeg audio (mp3). Audio does not work yet, this is a place holder.
• ab=256 sets the bitrate of the transcoded audio (256 Kb/s)
• scale=1 sets the scaling value
• width=1280 sets the width of the transcoded video to 1280 pixels
• height=800 sets the height of the transcoded video to 800 pixels
• :rtp tells VLC that we want to use rtp protocol to send the encoder output to our receiver machine using Real Time Protocol.
• dst=192.168.1.2 is the ip address of our destination/playback machine
• port=1234 is the default port on the destination/playback machine
• access=udp specifies UDP protocol
• mux=ts sets multiplexing to mpeg-2 Transport stream

Now on the destination machine just open vlc, goto File/Open Network and by default the Media Resource Locator on top of the window should read udp:// and UDP/RTP with port 1234 should be selected. If it’s not select UDP/RTP (option 1) and put 1234 as the port number. Press Okay and you should see the video stream from the other machine (your server machine). That’s it….Opensource comes to rescue again

I’ve been trying to figure out a way to do this on the cheap for a long time and I finally figured it out today. This process allows you to grab HDV from a HDV Camera via firewire, feed it into linux, transcode the 25Mb/s mpeg-ts stream to a 4 Mb/s mpeg4 stream (inside a TS). This mpeg4 stream in turn can be viewed at full resolution (1920×1080) on a remote client running just vlc. Here is the prerequisites:

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).

sudo dvgrab -f hdv -noavc -nostop -|vlc - --sout '#transcode{vcodec=mp4v,vb=4096,acodec=mpga,ab=256,scale=0.5,deinterlace,width=1920,height=1080}:duplicate{dst=std{access=udp,mux=ts,dst=receiver_ip_address:1234}}'
This is one massive command, the first part we already discussed, so lets take a look at the second half:

• –sout is our output chain.
• #transcode tells vlc that we first want to transcode the input using parameters to follow
• {} contains our transcoding parameters
• vcodec=mp4v sets the video codec to mpeg4 video
• vb=4096 sets the bitrate of the transcoded video (4Mb/s)
• acodec=mpga sets the audio codec to mpeg audio (mp3)
• ab=256 sets the bitrate of the transcoded audio (256 Kb/s)
• scale=1 sets the scaling value
• deinterlace sets guess what?
• width=1920 sets the width of the transcoded video to 1920 pixels
• height=1080 sets the height of the transcoded video to 1080 pixels
• :duplicate tells VLC that we want to duplicate the transcoded signal and send a copy of it to our receiver machine.
• dst is the destination string
• access=udp specifies UDP protocol
• mux=ts sets multiplexing to mpeg-2 Transport stream
• dst=receiver_ip_address:1234 is the ip address and port number of the receiving machine

So now you should be able to open up vlc on the receiver machine, goto File/Open Network menu and select UDP/RTP and specify port number 1234. Once you press OK, you should see the video stream on your receiver machine. Audio works as well and is perfectly synced since it’s captured by the HDV camera at the source and travels together with the video at all time. The delay is about 3 seconds.

This is a great way to quickly setup a HD Video Conference between a couple of locations. You could even modify the network portion of the chain to let VLC multicast the HD stream onto your network…..lots of possibilities. Enjoy