Greetings wise Access Grid admins, I'm working to improve the video quality of our version 2.3 Access Grid configuration running on a dual Athlon 2400+ system with 3 GB RAM running Windows XP. I'm quickly running out of things to try and would appreciate any input the group might have.
We have three capture devices, a Logitech QuickCam Pro 4000, an Orange Micro iBot FireWire Web Cam and a Sony Handycam TRV460 using USB streaming. The QuickCam and Handycam connects using the systems 1.1 USB ports while the iBot attaches through an Adaptec AFW-4300B FireWire card. All cameras work fine with the 2.3 AG configuration using the Microsoft WDM Image Capture driver and broadcast at 320x240 (24fps, I think). I know the Handycam captures at 720x480 and I've seen the h261 vic protocol broadcast at 352x288, so I purchased a FireWire cable thinking I could at least transmit a cropped version of the digital video signal from the Sony. So far, no success with any of the versions of Vic that I have found. I'll detail the steps I have taken and the problems encountered below. My first question would be how are some of these sites transmitting at 352x288 since I doubt they use cameras that capture at this resolution. Are there any video utilities I can use to grab a video signal, shrink it down and then re-stream it as a DirectShow device so the Microsoft WDM Image Capture driver can use it? Would moving to Linux help this situation at all or should I look into buying some more professional equipment? Thanks in advance for any other ideas, suggestions or infodocs. Brian Kelly bke...@unidata.ucar.edu University Corporation for Atmospheric Research Here's my experience so far with getting a Sony Handycam TRV460 to send video over FireWire to Vic running on Windows XP: I first installed the provided Sony drivers and plugged the camera into the FireWire port. The system saw the device and configured it. I looked under the "Scanners and Cameras" device section of the "My Computer" listing and saw the device defined there. I double clicked the icon and got a 360x240 picture from the camera. Great! So, I ran a stock Access Grid 2.3 and entered a venue. A dialog box asking me to select a device came up and I selected the DV Handycam signal. When I clicked "OK" I got the well known vic error: Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Library Runtime Error! Program: ...vic.exe This application has requested the Runtime to terminate... blah...blah...blah I tried fiddling with the video settings in vic, but the error never changed. I also started playing with a Microsoft video tool called AMCAP that was installed with the Orange Micro camera. It shows all the DirectShow sources and will display the video from any of them upon request. It worked fine for all the video sources except the digital video from the Handycam. I started looking for some answers around the net, and came across another version of vic stored at http://www-mice.cs.ucl.ac.uk/multimedia/software/vic/download.html. It's the same version, but has a later date, so I downloaded it and swapped the VideoProducerService directories in AccessGrid\local_services. I re-ran the Access Grid client and tried to connect to the FireWire device. It still failed, but I got a more descriptive errors: capDriverConnect: dev=0 failed - 0 capGetDriverCaps: failed - 0 capGetVideoFormat: failed - 0 This told me that vic was failing earlier than I suspected. It couldn't connect to the video feed at all, so I started looking for newer Sony drivers for the Handycam. There were some, but they didn't include anything for digital video. More digging showed that Sony depends on Windows drivers for video transfer. One site recommended making use the driver file C:\Windows\system32\drivers\msdv.sys was at least version 5.3 with some cameras or there would be problems. Mine was version 5.1. I started looking for the latest, but had more problems. msdv.sys is part of DirectX, but we had the latest installed, 9.0b. I kept searching for a place to download the latest version, but came up empty. Finally I decided to download Windows XP service pack 2 from Microsoft's update web site. To my surprise, a new version of the file was included in the package and I had version 5.3 of the driver. The AMCAP utility now worked and showed the camcorder's video at a beautiful 720x480. I then fired up the Access Gird with the new vic driver and tried to connect. It failed again, but with different errors this time: Image dimensions not suitable. ICLocate: Unable to find supported bpp for format 64737664! RGB_Converter: Unsupported bpp! Then came the old vic.exe runtime error. To me, this looks like I'm now running into the 352x288 limitation of h261. I was hoping vic would either scale or crop an oversized stream, but that appears to not be the case. So, I've been looking for something that can do the job for vic. I've not looked into hardware, but I have downloaded a few software products that look promising; however I've not found a way to get the video into vic after it has been processed. I've seen a few recommendations on this group to try the openmash vic distribution with h263 support, so I downloaded that and gave it a try. It seemed to work fine with my USB video sources, but when I selected either the iBot or Handycam FireWire signal, it gave the error: vic: cannot open capture device. Is another program using the device? My guess is that the mash version doesn't currently support FireWire devices. And that's where I am today. Either I need a hardware or software solution to shrinking a video stream or a h261 compatible version of vic that can handle 720x480. I just saw the ACE port overview at http://ace.netmedia.gist.ac.kr which supports 720x480, so I'll look there next. If anyone else has some additions, they would be most welcome. Thanks again!
