stream HDV ?

[adaviel]

We have a Sony HDR-HC3 camera, capable of either DV or HDV 1080i output over
Firewire.

Is it possible to stream HDV MPEG2 from this camera in VLC ?
If so, what recipe? The docs appear to discuss only DV format.

I am able to capture output using test-mpeg2 from the libiec61883-1.0.0
package. (Linux)

[matthew.geier]

We have a Sony HDR-HC3 camera, capable of either DV or HDV 1080i output over
Firewire.

Is it possible to stream HDV MPEG2 from this camera in VLC ?
If so, what recipe? The docs appear to discuss only DV format.

As far as i'm aware all these cameras output DV video in various forms and not MPEG. They do not and can not encode to mpeg.

You would need to encode to MPEG2 on the fly. At 1080i resolution this would be quite a job to do 'real time' with any decent quality I would expect. (And there would be little point in transmitting a crap looking HD signal would there

You could always just stream the raw DV if you network is up to it

[adaviel]

This camera encodes MPEG2 to tape, probably with an ASIC.

from http://www.sonystyle.com:
"Sony developed a Real Time MPEG Encode/Decode system with reduced energy consumption and compact size to fit inside a personal camcorder. This engine provides efficient MPEG2 compression, and recording and playback of clear HD images at the same bit rate of the DV format, so that High Definition video can be recorded on the same MiniDV cassettes as are used for SD recording."

Files captured with test-mpeg2 are detected by mplayer as:
Video: MPEG2 1440x1080 (aspect 3) 29.970 fps
Audio: MPEG layer-2, layer-3 48000 Hz, 2 ch, s16le

There is a menu item on the camera to select recording format either DV or HDV.
DV is readable with dvgrab and probably VLC. HDV is readable with test-mpeg2 as I
stated.

There is also a menu item to convert HDV recorded on tape to DV on Firewire on the fly.
I have not tried this yet but presume it reduces the image size. I presume this is
also handled in hardware.

[Guest]

Are you able to view the input in realtime using VLC? If so, what command line options are you using?

I should be working with an HD camera later today, and I will probably encounter the same problem. If you can get it to display in VLC, though, getting it streaming should only be a matter of adding the appropriate --sout options to your command line.

So to get VLC streaming to 123.123.123.123 on port 1234, you'd have:

./vlc [existing options/input modules] --sout "#standard{access=udp,mux=ts,dst=123.123.123.123:1234}"

at the terminal. And then on the other end, something like

./vlc udp/:@:1234 [any other options]

Or is the problem more complicated than this?

[Guest]

Update: It is perfectly possible to stream HDV, assuming your bandwidth allows (~30 Mb/s).

If you can get input using test-mpeg2, just pipe it to vlc with something like:

test-mpeg2 | vlc -

(The dash tells vlc to accept input from stdin.) Then append whatever sout options you want.

Let us know if this works!