x264enc problem in GStreamer video switcher solved

Back in August 2010 I ran a brief experiment using GstInputSelector to switch between various video sources. You may have noticed that it was using Theora encoder while most of my other DVB experiments used H.264 encoder in MPEG-TS container. The reason for this was that I could not make x264enc work in the pipeline used for the video switcher.

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Ubuntu 10.10 on the Acer Aspire 5745G Laptop

Now that Ubuntu 10.10 is out I am slowly upgrading my computers one by one. Today it was time to perform the upgrade on my newest (in terms of technology) and most bad ass computer, the Acer Aspire 5745G Laptop. I have previously written about running Ubuntu 10.04 on it, which was the first Linux OS I have installed. Already with Ubuntu 10.04 everything was working and only the Ethernet interface required manual installation of driver. Installing Ubuntu 10.10 was a simple matter of performing the upgrade from within the package manager.

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Nice review of Gpredict

I stumbled upon this nice review of Gpredict Jack Wallen at ghacks.net : Track satellites with Gpredict. It’s always good to hear what other people think about it and I was particularly happy to read that Gpredict is an incredibly simple to use tool that will allow anyone to track multiple satellites quickly and easily. … Read more

Webcam pixel formats and Gstreamer caps filters

Up until now I have been using the standard (link) YUV 4:2:2 pixel format with my Logitech Webcam Pro 9000. This format is good for most cases; however, the framerate is limited to 15/2 fps at 1280×720 resolution, while the other supported formats (MJPG, RGB3, BGR3, YU12, YV12) support this reolution with up to 30 fps! So it was time for me to figure it out.

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GstInputSelector to switch between different cameras

An email on the gst-devel mailing list last week pointed me to a rather interesting example in the gst-python repository: switch.py – shows how to use the GstInputSelector element in a Python script to select between different input streams. When I looked at the example I thought right away that it would be cool to use it to switch between different cameras in my simple DVB setup that uses Gstreamer and GNU Radio.

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