[streaming] Controlling three video cameras on a robot.

[Alexander Isacson]

Hi all.

I'm building a robot with three video cameras. One used when driving
forward, the second when driving backwards and the third is a pan, tilt,
zoom camera used to look around. I want to stream the video to the
operator. The CPU is a 1GHz VIA-C3 capable of encoding two streams
simultaneously if I encode one in 400x300 and the other at 200x150.

At first a thought about running the following command to start one
stream:

vlc -I rc v4l:/dev/video0:norm=pal:size=400x300
v4l:/dev/video1:norm=pal:size=400x300
v4l:/dev/video2:norm=pal:size=400x300 --sout
'#transcode{vcodec=mpgv,vb=2000}:std{access=udp,mux=ts,url=operator:1234}'

and a similar one, with different size and port, to start the second
stream. 

The operator would then have to change channels by issuing "next" and
"prev" commands in the console interface. I was planning to let the
robot control software issue those command by piping stdin and stdout.
But using python that didn't seem to work. Another problem is that if
you change the stream on the server side the clients sometimes stops and
has to be restarted. 

Because of this started looking into VLS. Is it possible to use
video-on-demand to stream all six channels, only two at a time, and then
let the operator switch channels on the client side? That would be allot
easier to implement and hopefully not hang the video while changing
channels.

Any suggestions to accomplish what I'm trying to do are welcome.

Regards
-- 
Alexander Isacson <alexander at isacson.info>

-- 
This is the streaming mailing-list, see http://www.videolan.org/streaming/
To unsubscribe, please read http://www.videolan.org/support/lists.html
If you are in trouble, please contact <postmaster at videolan.org>