[NCLUG] V4L Snapshot help

[Rob Bayerl]

On Thu, Oct 9, 2008 at 11:48 PM, Grant Johnson <grant at amadensor.com> wrote:
> I do not know what the format is when I do the cat.   When I use mencoder to
> grab it, it it OK, though.  I told mencoder to grab a few frames (when I
> told it only one frame, it wigged out, and got nothing, so I told it 3, and
> it seems pretty good.)  Then I told ffmpeg to make png out of it.  It seems
> to work.  The only thing (and this doesn't really matter for what I am
> doing) is that I have not yet figured out how to capture sound with it.  If
> I really need the sound, I will probably just route it through my sound
> card.

What does file say it is?  The audo/video decoder is the successor to
bt878 so I *think* it will either be raw jpeg, mjpeg or rtjpeg.

Not sure how relevant/recent this is, "Nevertheless, the built-in TV
sound decoder starts working now, at least for PAL-BG. Other TV norms
need other code ... " from
<http://www.linuxtv.org/v4lwiki/index.php/Cx88_devices_(cx2388x)#Current_status>

> I am planning of capturing a shot of the prairie.  It should be kinda cool
> this winter when things are ugly.  I will pass out the URL if anyone cares
> once I get it up and running.
>
> I have an outdoor camera (small and cheap at Harbor Freight, and does
> infrared so it works in low light) and a Pinnacle PCTV HD 800i video
> capture/tuner card I got from Woot! for $20.  Years ago I had the prairie
> dog camera.   Now we have no rodents, but we will have snow, wind,
> neighbor's horses, etc. to look at.

Once again I think you should run ZoneMinder
<http://www.zoneminder.com>.  It can be set just to record when there
is motion and reportedly uses very little CPU and not a lot of disk
space (with the right setting).  It's intended as a security
application, but I think it could give you a pretty sweet set up.