Grabbing video with O2 for use on PeeCee, a recipe.

From: Avi Bercovich (avi_at_sillypages.org)
Date: 01/20/04 

Date: Tue, 20 Jan 2004 21:22:46 +0100

Hi All,

Every so often there's a thread here that either moans of impossible or
groans
of frustration about getting MJPEG footage off an O2 into a PeeCee,
generally
for compression to something small, modern and destinctly PeeCee-ish
like DivX
and Xvid. So here's my recipe for brilliant analogue O2 capture and fast
PeeCee
compression.

I;ve used this without any dropped frames or other nonesense with a
180Mhz
512KB SC r5k O2, a 200Mhz 1Mb SC r5k O2 and a 250Mhz 1Mb SC r10k O2.

0. install on PeeCee:

  a. the morgan multimedia mjpeg codec version 3.0.0.9,
  b. the Koepi Binary for Windows of the Xvid codec.
  c. VirtualDub

I find the Xvid codec to be better than DivX, also I prefer their
politics. :)

1. set O2 MVP device settings using the 'vcp' video control panel. Use
'videoin' to help you get it right.

Certain low-end VCR's don;t produce a signal that the O2 can use
properly. Get a better VCR or a TBC, there's nothing wrong with your O2.

Here are my personal favourites, I like high-contrast images and
slightly
under-saturated colours:

(X) Auto gain control
Aperture 0.25
Bandspass freq: 4.1
Chroma bandwidth: 920
luma delay -74 nSec

brightness 132.000
contrast 1.140
saturation .875
hue -11.250

2. have a look at the load on your O2, make sure you've got next to
nothing
running in the background, and don;t use the machine for other things
whilst
grabbing or you'll get dropped frames. Guaranteed.

3. grab footage on O2 into an AVI file with 'dmrecord' like so:

  dmrecord -v -a -t nnnn -p audio -p video,comp=jpeg,quality=95
somefile.avi

where nnnn is the number of seconds you want to grab.

4. Go back to the PeeCee and tell the codec to use the FourCC: 'JPEG'
(top righthand corner of the Morgan Codec UI, red smily thing in the
toolbox)

5. make sure Samba is running on the O2, else you need to copy multi-Gb
files to the PeeCee, with Samba you simply load the footage over the
wire as needed.

6. open your footage into VirtualDub using the 'Open file' dialog. After
selecting the somefile.avi file containing the footage, check the option
'ask
for extended options afer this dialog'.

7. when the extended option dialog appears, check 'force video format
FourCC' and 'force video codec handler FourCC' and set both of these
options to 'jpeg'.

8. the selected M-JPEG video will now load into VirtualDub faultlessly.

9. From here on it is all about using VirtualDub and other PeeCee
compressed
video utilities. There are a million guides about how to do this, but it
would
seem that www.doom9.com is a good place to start.

I hope this helps somebody ;)

grts,

avi