Video Widget

[Dean Roddey]

Outstanding! So, with the HTML 5 client that is being developed, could this also work with that? (I know you are just getting your feet wet, just throwing the idea out there)

This wouldn't I don't think. I guess we'd have to use the HTML5 embedded player for that?

[Dean Roddey]

Well I think it's sufficiently OK to move forward on the new widget to support it. I'll start on that tomorrow.

I noticed, at least with this camera, it sort of goes through a kind of cycle where it starts off a bit darker, then gets a bit lighter over about five seconds, then it blinks and starts back again. But VLC itself is doing the same thing when I play this stream through it, so whatever it is is not because I'm doing something wrong.

Maybe there are other options we'll need to make available via config as well. I'm going to have a 'parameter string' attribute on the widget that will just be a quoted comma list. That will leave us open to add any sort of parameters required over time, which would be used to drive something in the way I set up the VLC engine.

[bryanb]

Dean,

Is it too much to ask? Could the new video widget be incorporated into a 4.8.x as well as a 5.x release? Thanks.

[Dean Roddey]

Yeh, I'm afraid that would be way too much. I'm making use of new stuff that would be difficult to back-port because it depends on other new stuff introduced for 5.x, and of course the widget configuration mechanism is completely different now so that would have to be completely rewritten as well.

[Dean Roddey]

OK, I have a video camera widget now and it's correctly showing the camera output, which is being scaled to fit the widget area. I still need to do some work, but it's basically there.

Interestingly, when scaled down like this it doesn't do the brightness/blink cycle I noted above, where I was displaying the full 1280x720 original source size. Not sure what the difference would be. The camera doesn't know the area, so it's still streaming the full data, so it's not like there's less load this way, I don't think.

[Dean Roddey]

OK, give 5.0.912 a try. See the release comments for details.

[Shaky]

Got it working here.  Will run it on two cameras for the day to see how it goes.

[Dean Roddey]

5.0.914 now will recycle the helper every two hours, to avoid accumulation of damage incurred by the vlc engine. This should hopefully prevent it from ever getting to the point where it causes an exception and has to be closed manually. We may be able to extend that period more without any issues.