2004-01-25

I tried for over 10 hours to get some recordings Claudia ¹ did using her DV camery – a Sony DCR-PC104E – onto a VCD (a very crude format for videos on CDs, which can be played on most DVD players).

¹

I based my stuff mostly on the MJPEG HOWTO ². I was unable to get the mjpeg-tools from the usual Debian sources, so I had to get the .deb files from the project download area. ³

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So here is what I did, after having used *kino* ⁴ to produce input.avi:

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The only problem is that the video output is distorted and shades of green. Terrible. 😟 As if it were copy protected. The sample video I was trying to put on the VCD was recorded from TV...

What did I do wrong? I don’t understand!

The mpg output is always green, even when I leave out the yuvscaler:

lav2yuv babyboy001.avi | mpeg2enc -f 1 -I 0 -o video.mpg

It must be an mpeg2enc problem. But what? Googling didn’t help.

Site notes:

My Kenwood HM-DV7 doesn’t play SVCDs, only VCDs. My Playstation 2 does not even play VCDs.

How to see the problem:

lav2yuv input.avi | yuvplay

It seems that other people are having the same problem. ⁵ Reading more in the archives, it seems that I need to recompile the mjpeg tools. ⁶ What a coincidence – this is the only deb package I downloaded from the developer site directly instead of getting it from an official Debian host. Why recompile? It seems that PAL produced by DV cameras is different from both normal PAL and from NTSC. Aren’t we happy with our industry!?

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I’m still not sure that’s it, however. ⁷ ⁸

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After mucking around with *aptitude* and *apt-get* to install the necessary libraries and -dev packages (I was unable to install both libdv-bin and libdv-dev, so I only installed libdv-dev), here is what I get:

~/src/mjpegtools-1.6.1.93% ./configure --with-dv-yv12

 ...

 MJPEG tools 1.6.1.93 build configuration :

    - X86 Optimizations:
      - MMX/3DNow!/SSE enabled      : true
      - cmov support enabled        : true


    - video4linux recording/playback: true
    - software MJPEG playback       : true
    - MPEG Z/Alpha                  : false
    - Quicktime playback/recording  : true
    - PNG input support             : true
    - AVI MJPEG playback/recording  : true (always)
    - libDV (digital video) support : true
    - libDV PAL YV12 read support   : true
    - Gtk+ support for glav         : true

Did I say lots of mucking with apt-get? I mean it! Getting all the libraries on a testing/unstable system can be a trying task. Everytime I get into this, I long back for the days when I was just using Debian stable. When did I first put my foot on that slippery road towards unstable?

Suggestions

Don’t know what is the source of the problem, but you might try:

http://ffmpeg.sourceforge.net/

http://www.theorie.physik.uni-goettingen.de/~ostreich/transcode/

http://www.theorie.physik.uni-goettingen.de/~ostreich/transcode/

Pierre

Thanks. Based on a comment from the mailing list, I’m now installing smiltutils ⁹. “They can convert the DV file to yuv format the mjpegtools can handle.” Sounds promising. 🙂

⁹

But alas, more mucking with aptitude and apt-get, and still no solution in sight. I can’t get imlib2 (dev) working. Trying to install imlib-dev... Doesn’t work... Argh! Broken packages all around me. 😟

A day later: Using smilutils worked after all. Getting the dependencies right on my testing/unstable system was hell, though. I should go back to Debian stable.

Copyright

Spent another hour or two chasing after missing ERC copyright assignments. Copyright law is wasting my time and energy!!

ERC