The VideoLAN Forums

Howdy,

first off, I think VLC is awesome, so this is probably something I've done wrong.

I'm trying to capture the video from my DC10+ card and stream it out, but even if I try play it back locally, it just shows grey.

I've configure VLC using --disable-dvd --disable-mad --enable-v4l --with-ffmpeg-tree=/home/nosh/ffmpeg....

When I run VLC, I _have_ to add MJPEG to the command line, otherwise the error I get is that no suitable access module was found for it, so my commandline ends up looking like:
vlc v4l:/dev/v4l/video0:channel=1:mjpeg

A video window comes up (in X or console), and it's just grey. I've tried changing to composite or s-video, nada.

XawTV shows the picture perfectly, as does capturing with ffmpeg and lavrec... they make perfect AVI files.

So I know VLC uses ffmpeg... and I've taken a look at the mjpeg code in v4l.c... but I cannot figure out what I'm missing to tell the card what it wants to know, could anyone _please_ help me!

<EDIT>
Just thought I'd mention that I tried vlc-0.7.0-test1.tar.bz2 yesterday, and now the screen is black
And versions I'm using: mpeg2dec-snapshot.tar.gz, ffmpeg-0.4.7.tar.gz, and now vlc-0.7.
I'm currently trying on Mandrake 9.2 as Redhat 9 is giving me endless grief about loadable module support even though it's enabled.

I'm not exactly a Linux genius, and I had to GREP for ffmpeg when compiling, then looked in the configure.ac file to find out why exactly the damn thing wouldn't find my recently compiled and installed ffmpeg...
Soooo, my point: perhaps you should put it somewhere in the compile instructions... and if it is already, then not only am I noob, but I can't read, and I apologise.
</EDIT>

Thanks in advance.

perhaps you are missing a lib or 5. linux is always missing a lib, its the eternal search for the lib.

Maybe you should resort to windoze/winblows/wInd0w5...

VLC is great btw, Linux on the other hand... I think whats needed is for a Windows development team to get hold of Linux, maybe they will finish it, nobody else seems able to.

Noshbar: Welcome to the world of redhat packages. that's why i always use gentoo or debian

It comes down to this. In linux terms, you are living on the edge of development when you use v4l and then you can always expect problems.

Thanks for the reply DJ, appreciate it.

And here goes something that no matter how I put it seems like a bash towards VLC, but it's not intended as such:

ffmpeg can capture a proper AVI from the device, as can XawTV.
Now, what I understand is that VLC uses ffmpeg, so it should be able to capture the video correctly... or am I being seriously dumb with the little know-how I have?

You've got a lot further than I have.
I have the same DC10+ card, but I can't get anything at all to work. Most I can manange is a blue screen in xawtv.
Where is a how-to or something which lists *every* step from installing the harware to capturing video? I can't find any instructions to make this work.