[gst-devel] Live Video Stream Mixer

[Nick Daniels]

Hi all,
I'm a final year Engineering undergraduate and have decided to spend my
final year project designing and building an open source software suite
which will hopefully allow for the cheap production of professional-style
live internet TV broadcasts using consumer hardware. I intend to use
GStreamer as the main framework to help build the software and was hoping I
may be able to get some advice from you guys about whether the idea is
actually feasible with GStreamer.

Here's a bit more detail: The idea is that input from consumer video cameras
will be transcoded and streamed live via LAN/internet to a central
"production server". The main aim of my project is to write the video mixer
software for this "production server" that will allow for multiple video
streams (with audio) to be cut/mixed together live into a single stream that
will be output as an internet TV channel. In the future I intend to extend
this to allow overlay of 2D and 3D moving graphics (such as tickers, logos
etc.), allow video fades, wipes etc. between streams and for playback of
local video files for mixing into the content (for VTs, ad breaks etc.). I
hope it will eventually become an open source software version of a live
video mixer/effects, opening up live TV production to the masses with little
cost involved!

So the technical issues - (and apologies if the q's seem obvious...I'm a bit
of a novice with audio/video software development!)
1) Is live mixing of video streams going to be possible using the GStreamer
framework and are there any suggestions on how I should look into
implementing this? Can I simply cut between pipeline frames once the video
has been decoded?
2) Are fades/wipes and motion graphics overlays going to be possible without
using things like OpenGL (or similar) to display the video and then capture
the frames back into a new pipeline (like screen capturing)?
3) Low latency is desirable, how powerful a PC would be required for this
decoding, mixing and recoding multiple low-res live video streams and is
there any graphics hardware acceleration available with GStreamer using
CUDA, OpenCL or similar?
4) In your opinions is this something that would be worth setting up as an
open source project in the future once I have done the ground work?

Many thanks in advance for any help and feedback!
Nick
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/gstreamer-devel/attachments/20091019/76482687/attachment.htm>