party fun ...

[thoralf]

Hi there,

I'm looking for a quick and easy way to make visuals for a not-so-ordinary party we're planning ...
Gear available: a dv camera, quite a decent computer (p4@2.6 gig) and a video beamer.
Is it possible to process the video stream delivered by the camera in real time? I thought about capturing the video using vdubmod, throwing some filters in (avs script) and playing the result via mplayers ascii art output - is this possible? Did you do something similar already?

Thank you for your input,
Thoralf.

[Neo Neko]

This should be doable. Mplayer under Linux can access TV tuner cards. You just need the right tuner card IIRC. The basic hauppage should do. Then it is just a matter of running the signal in and though aalib then out to the screen. I think geexbox would do all that on a 1Ghz pc. Mplayer under windows in my experience is a dog and I doubt evena P4 2.6 will be adequate. If you plan to run out as ASCII art I don't see a big reason to do any avisynth processing as most of the finer details are lost. Also you might be better able to get videolan to do what you want. Especially under windows.

[thoralf]

Hi Neo,

thank you for your reply.

Do I really need a tv tuner card to do this stuff? The dv cam comes with firewire, so I thought that there might be a way to bypass the capturing step and manipulate the video stream (which is digital already) directly - any idea about this?

You're right about filtering being useless when doing aa output, but I'd like to be able to switch between filtered video output and nonfiltered aa output on the fly. I imagine something like stacking 4 instances of the same source and adjust the colours etc. of each of the instances independently. I think only avisynth will be up to this :-)

About Mplayer on windozes: on my laptop (p3@500) this nifty player is about the only option I have to play back xvid streams with ogg audio. All DirectShow-based players spit on this, and even vlc is not up to the task ...

Thank you for your answer,
Thoralf.

edit: bad english ...