[mythtv-users] mythtv-users Digest, Vol 84, Issue 29

[Bruce]

Yan and David, thanks for the responses


At 09:12 AM 3/8/2010, Bruce wrote:
>At 06:36 AM 3/8/2010, mythtv-users-request at mythtv.org wrote:
>>Date: Sun, 07 Mar 2010 19:28:23 -0800
>>From: Yan Seiner <yan at seiner.com>
>>Subject: Re: [mythtv-users] Four webcams, time shifting
>>To: Discussion about mythtv <mythtv-users at mythtv.org>
>>Message-ID: <4B946ED7.6040108 at seiner.com>
>>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>>
>>David Whyte wrote:
>> > On Mon, Mar 8, 2010 at 10:27 AM, Bruce <bruce at brucelin.ca> wrote:
>> >
>> >> My initial thoughts were to try to do this with VideoLAN, but it just
>> >> doesn't have the same PVR (i.e. timeshifting) capabilities. I could 
>> probably
>> >> kludge together the 1 minute delay, but the longer times become a 
>> headache.
>> >>
>> >> It's basically timeshifting I'm trying to do, so a PVR package might 
>> be the
>> >> best bet. I gather MythTV can take webcams as inputs, as long as I 
>> have the
>> >> right Linux-compatible webcam?
>> >>
>> > Not sure, but zoneminder might be an option.  It will allow you to
>> > record webcams to disk and play it back.  I imagine you can modify the
>> > URL query to somehow always play back video that is 1min, 1hour or
>> > even 1day old or something.
>> >
>>I'd seriously look at motion.  You could do this with a few scripts.
>>
>>Myth is way too heavy for this very lightweight application.
>>
>>http://www.lavrsen.dk/twiki/bin/view/Motion/WebHome
>>
>>Capture the frames, store them, then play them back.
>>
>>You'd need some CPU horsepower and mando hardrive space but the rest is
>>easy.
>>
>>--Yan

Yan and David, thanks for the responses. I looked into Motion and I just 
have one (probably naive) question.

Motion with ffmpeg could record the webcam outputs as slowly growing MPEG 
files, which I'd play back with a delay and then throw away. I would need 
to run a player program (e.g. mplayer) to view an MPEG file at the same 
time it was being written to by Motion. Is Linux happy to let me do that 
without affecting the file writing process?

Cheers,

Bruce