I didn't know you had to reload the driver to change the settings in the
Hauppauge cards. I don't know the technical difficulties for exposing the
h264 encoder using the v4l2 specification, but there should be room in such
specification for incorporating a device representing the encoder, with all
their properties accesible.

Of course using a Gstreamer plugin is another option (anyway, the plugin
would need to use a custom method to access the card encoder), but if it is
exposed as a v4l device, the solution will be much more "universal", so to
speak.

Re. your initial question: I believe that any Matterhorn-compatible hardware
is always welcome, and such cards are a very interesting product which many
adopters could be very interested in (the University of Vigo being one of
them).

Best regards
Rubén

2011/10/13 Curtis Hall <[email protected]>

> Greg is right.  Technically you could probably use gstreamer without
> much, if any, modification.  However gstreamer would only be accessing
> the MJPEG encoder, not the H.264 compressed stream.  The H.264
> compressed stream also gives benefits since it does deinterlacing and
> provides a better image quality then the MJPEG encoder.
>
> Thanks
>
> 2011/10/13 Rubén Pérez <[email protected]>:
> > I'm confused:
> > aren't Bluecherry cards already being used with Gstreamer? If the v4l2
> > driver exposes the card capabilities correctly, is there a real need for
> an
> > specific gstreamer plugin? Wouldn't be better to dedicate efforts to
> improve
> > the driver conformance to the v4l2 standards and document their use (and
> > maybe providing some software to automatize the operations to fine-tune
> the
> > cards?).
> > Best regards
> > Rubén
> >
> > 2011/10/11 Christopher Brooks <[email protected]>
> >>
> >> Hi,
> >>
> >> Just to chime in.  One of the particularly nice things about using a
> >> dedicated hardware encoder for incoming video streams is that the
> >> presentation stream (hdmi/vga/etc.) could then have more access to the
> >> CPU for encoding.  Really nice when you want to squeak more frames out
> >> of it at a higher bitrate.
> >>
> >> The H.264 compression cards are pretty reasonably priced, I think we
> >> pay $150 for the non hardware encoding cards right now.  And that's for
> >> a card that only does one port at 30 fps, and each additional feed
> >> would drop the fps in half.  That BC-H04120A can do 30 fps
> >> simultaneously on all ports.
> >>
> >> Network streaming would be great for finishing off confidence
> >> monitoring.  A feature lacking in Matterhorn (though some is coming up
> >> in 1.3) in part because of the need to encode multiple streams...
> >>
> >> Chris
> >>
> >> On Tue, 11 Oct 2011
> >> 15:40:02 -0500 Curtis Hall <[email protected]> wrote:
> >>
> >> > Hi,
> >> >
> >> > I'm Curtis with Bluecherry.  We provide software compression cards
> >> > that some Opencast members are using (PV-143, PV-149, PV-981 etc).
> >> > We also produce H.264 hardware compression cards which does the
> >> > compression on the card itself.  We also provide a Video4Linux2
> >> > driver for these cards ( https://github.com/bluecherrydvr/solo6x10).
> >> >
> >> > I've talked to Chris Brooks a couple times about these cards and I've
> >> > gained some decent information on how these cards can benefit the
> >> > Opencast application by compressing the video on the cards instead of
> >> > on the processor. I've attached a couple emails between Chris and our
> >> > developers about what the gstreamer plugin would need to support.
> >> >
> >> > My question comes down to the amount of people that would potentially
> >> > be interested in these cards.  We would incur a expense in hiring a
> >> > contractor to complete the gstreamer plugin, so I'm doing the math to
> >> > see if it would be cost effective for us to start on the gstreamer
> >> > plugin.
> >> >
> >> > The following cards are available:
> >> >
> >> > BC-H04120A PCIe ($219.95) - 4 port
> >> > BC-H04120A Mini-PCI ($199.95) - 4 port
> >> > BC-H16480A PCIe ($299.95 - 16 port
> >> >
> >> >
> >> >
> http://store.bluecherry.net/search.php?search_query=bc-h&button.x=0&button.y=0&button=Submit
> >> >
> >> > Thanks!
> >> >
> >> >
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> --
> >> Christopher Brooks, BSc, MSc
> >> ARIES Laboratory, University of Saskatchewan
> >>
> >> Web: http://www.cs.usask.ca/~cab938
> >> Phone: 1.306.966.1442
> >> Mail: Advanced Research in Intelligent Educational Systems Laboratory
> >>     Department of Computer Science
> >>     University of Saskatchewan
> >>     176 Thorvaldson Building
> >>     110 Science Place
> >>     Saskatoon, SK
> >>     S7N 5C9
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> Matterhorn-users mailing list
> >> [email protected]
> >> http://lists.opencastproject.org/mailman/listinfo/matterhorn-users
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Matterhorn-users mailing list
> > [email protected]
> > http://lists.opencastproject.org/mailman/listinfo/matterhorn-users
> >
> >
>
>
>
> --
> Curtis Hall ([email protected])
> Bluecherry - www.bluecherrydvr.com / store.bluecherry.net
> (877) 418-3391 x 283
> (573) 642-6161 x 283
> _______________________________________________
> Matterhorn-users mailing list
> [email protected]
> http://lists.opencastproject.org/mailman/listinfo/matterhorn-users
>
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