Can VLC be used as a live video switcher?

[tamray]

Our church has a vedeonics switcher that just died. I have 4 cameras I need to switch between, and send the video out to a DV deck. Can this be done with VLC? They are hoping for a no cost/low cost solution, and I have several video capture cards I can use.

Also, I need to have a simple fade as I switch, so we can avoid ugly transitions.

[dionoea]

You can achieve something like a switch using VLC's mosaic feature. It can be a bit hard to understand how to set it up but once that's done it'll work

Info about the mosaic is available here:
http://wiki.videolan.org/Mosaic

I guess that you could even do some fade ins/out using the RC interface mosaic commands ... but that won't be very user friendly (unless you know some scripting language of course :p)

[tamray]

I need to have ntsc output. From first glance it does not look like this will work for that. Am I wrong?

[dionoea]

I don't see why it wouldn't (you'll need hardware to connect a computer to your TV deck anyway)

[tamray]

I have briefly looked over the docs on this. It seems it is designed to overlay 3 video sources over a finale output. I need to switch between video sources, with a single source displayed at any given time. I imagined this would be done by tapping the space bar, or some other function key. Am I able to accomplish this with the mosaic feature?

[dionoea]

Yeah ... but it wouldn't be as easy to use as your professional solution (and might be a bit more error prone). But it'd work

You can define a mosaic with 3 overlay sources and only enable one at a time. (This "enable" operation isn't done using the space bar but with a small text command ... but that could be automatized somehow)