[gst-devel] Starting to use GStreamer as both streaming source and target

[Philip Van Hoof]

Hi there,

At the location where I'm doing a project (Maia Scientific) we are
creating an application that basically asks a motorized microscope to go
to a certain XY and Z (focus) position and take a picture. After taking
the picture some image analysis is performed upon it. Like counting
cells. Or measuring their sizes. Stuff like that.

Not really important for the question but some of you people might like
to know in which type of technology some of your opensource work is
being used today.

For taking those pictures we are, of course, using cameras. And for
bringing the video of such a camera to the computer we are, of course,
using a professional framegrabber. A framegrabber which isn't supported
by with a typical "Video4Linux" device driver. The type of device driver
thats takes care of support on Linux will basically make the framebuffer
memory readable and some ioctl-calls possible from userspace. And
there's a binary-only library to do useful stuf with the card.

We'd now like to create a small video-streaming server. Why would we
like to do this: the customer who is going to use the device/software,
likes to see live video-images coming from the "microscope". We,
however, separated userinterface from core-software. We can't access the
video framegrabber from the userinterface directly.

The good thing, however, is that both softwares are using common
technologies also seen in many GNOME applications. They currently
communicate through CORBA by using ORBit-2.

We can, on the core-software, trigger an event each time a frame is
written/available. We have a very good knowledge of the device itself
and know when a vsync happens. We also know when odd/even lines are
written. And we can create a ringbuffer of multiple frames and also know
which frame was the last one, and we can read all those frames.

We have a pointer to the framebuffer (which holds a typical RGB PAL
image) and we know the formatting and how to, for example, write it to
an image-file.

How can we, using that as source, easily create a GStreamer-video
streaming server? And how can we easily create a client that will
display the video-stream? (I'll probably look at the sources of Totem
for the client). Where can I find the demo's and sources? Which
applications demonstrate what we are planning to create?





-- 
Philip Van Hoof, Software Developer @ Cronos
home: me at freax dot org
gnome: pvanhoof at gnome dot org
work: philip dot vanhoof at cronos dot be
junk: philip dot vanhoof at gmail dot com
http://www.freax.be, http://www.freax.eu.org