frame serving on linux?

[thoralf]

hi there,

i'm facing the challenge of marrying a linux application with live input from a dv cam - the bad thing is that it is only aware of avi files as video input. so a frameserver would come in handy here ...
very much to my surprise, extensive googling didn't turn up anything useful. while dvgrab can frameserve via a pipe, it cannt do so via a file. same thing with ffmpeg. gstreamer looks promising, but it looks like it can deliver the frames only to other gstreamer-aware apps. avisynth 3 would probably be the tool to use, but i'm afraid it isn't mature enough yet.
so is there any linux application that can read video frames from a pipe and serve these frames as raw (dv) video or huffyuv or whatever to other applications via a fake video file?

thank you for your help,
thoralf.

[nm]

I don't think that frameserving via a file could possibly work if the application that reads the file does not support the frame server or use an input interface that makes such a hack possible (as VFW does with AviSynth). So, unless the app can be tweaked to support other inputs, you'll need to dump the stream to a file and read that.

[thoralf]

So, unless the app can be tweaked to support other inputs, you'll need to dump the stream to a file and read that.

thanks nm. that woudn't be realtime, then, if at all possible. i really hope that either gstreamer or avisynth 3 (or even better, both of them) will become usable any time soon.

with kind regards,
thoralf.

[nm]

Gstreamer would probably work fine right now if the application would support it as an input.

[708145]

thanks nm. that woudn't be realtime, then, if at all possible. i really hope that either gstreamer or avisynth 3 (or even better, both of them) will become usable any time soon.

with kind regards,
thoralf.

What's wrong with a FIFO?
just output to a fake file (via mkfifo)

bis besser,
T0B1A5

[thoralf]

What's wrong with a FIFO?
just output to a fake file (via mkfifo)

named pipes, great idea ... never occured to me. unfortunately, my app doesn't seem to support this.

thanks,
thoralf.

[communist]

Wow! Thanks Tobias - I was thinking how to solve a similar situation yesterday (how to let 2 processes access one tv-card) and the logical solution to me was frame serving.. but with avs3 being still experimental and me being a clueless linux beginner I didn try anything.
Then just by coincidence I saw this post and tried it out - works great :)