Video Widget

[Dean Roddey]

Oh, yeh, I did, but I got lost in VLC land. I've been around and around and I still can't find a solid answer for how to get the SDK. They they just don't make it available for download I have no idea. It's not filling me with confidence.

[Dean Roddey]

This site has an open source rtsp client: Live555

That doesn't look too promising either, at least for for our needs.

[Dean Roddey]

OK, I think I finally got the right files for LibVLC. I'll see what I can figure out.

[Dean Roddey]

OK, I just got a little test program displaying the camera output. I went ahead and just started with the web browser widget helper and modified that so that, if it went well, it would already be in the form required. It kind of freaked me out because it enabled the mic and the mic was picking up the speakers and it went into this recursive audio freak-out, and I'd not implemented any exit handler since normally this little probably has no user input. It wasn't feedback but more of an industrial noise meets hip-hop beat recursion, and it was getting more and more intense as I scrambled to shut it down via other means.

Of course this is far from industrial strength. I'm not dealing with any sort of errors or anything. I have no idea what will happen if it loses the network connection or anything like that, and how to recover. So there's a good bit more work to do.

But, it obviously works. You'll have to have VLC 32 bit installed and you'll have to make sure the main VLC directory is included in the system's PATH environment variable, since this helper program will otherwise fail to load because it won't find the required DLLs or the plugins (which apparently it uses based on the type of content it's told to play.)

I'll bang on it some more tomorrow. And I'll have to add a new interface widget to support it, which will let you provide the required configuration data. That's not a trivial undertaking either, but not enormous.

I'll see if it's reasonable to get this into 5.1, which would be a nice thing if possible. It would be another nice brick in our wall.

[DaveB]

OK, I just got a little test program displaying the camera output. I went ahead and just started with the web browser widget helper and modified that so that, if it went well, it would already be in the form required. It kind of freaked me out because it enabled the mic and the mic was picking up the speakers and it went into this recursive audio freak-out, and I'd not implemented any exit handler since normally this little probably has no user input. It wasn't feedback but more of an industrial noise meets hip-hop beat recursion, and it was getting more and more intense as I scrambled to shut it down via other means.

Of course this is far from industrial strength. I'm not dealing with any sort of errors or anything. I have no idea what will happen if it loses the network connection or anything like that, and how to recover. So there's a good bit more work to do.

But, it obviously works. You'll have to have VLC 32 bit installed and you'll have to make sure the main VLC directory is included in the system's PATH environment variable, since this helper program will otherwise fail to load because it won't find the required DLLs or the plugins (which apparently it uses based on the type of content it's told to play.)

I'll bang on it some more tomorrow. And I'll have to add a new interface widget to support it, which will let you provide the required configuration data. That's not a trivial undertaking either, but not enormous.

I'll see if it's reasonable to get this into 5.1, which would be a nice thing if possible. It would be another nice brick in our wall.

Why does simply pressing "reply" act exactly like hitting "quote"??

Anyway, I am very interested.  Let me know if you need some testing completed.  I have four cameras and not one of the same manufacturer and they all display well in VLC.

[Shaky]

Count me in as helping test if needed too.  I use Zoneminder and I can display feeds from it in VLC via Open Network Stream.  This would be a great addition as I currently have to jump through hoops to get my cameras to display and they frequently freeze up in the web widget.

[bryanb]

Great news. Tremendous progress.

[batwater]

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)

[batwater]

Why does simply pressing "reply" act exactly like hitting "quote"??

Use the "New Reply" button at the bottom of the thread screen instead of the Reply button in the post in question. Quote button is additive and can be used to quote more than one message.  Reply button in message will quote that message only.

[Dean Roddey]

I seem to have it able now to recover if I unplug the camera or the ethernet cable. I've got a little state machine setup in the helper program and it watches for errors and resets itself back to trying to start playback. Then it starts waiting to see a playback event. If that doesn't happen within 10 seconds, it restarts the process again, until it reconnects.