Sa'habuntu Live CD

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Revision as of 18:06, 21 July 2008 by Sevy (talk | contribs)

Context And Goals

This task aims at providing an up-to-date and complete live CD made for streaming. In G.I.S.S. 2.0, a first version has been made, and is usable for most streaming situations, see Sa'habuntu Live CD version 11, it must now be adapted and completed with ad-hoc tools and howtos.

Work achieved

The decision has been taken to base the new release on Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron, the CD will mainly be produced for i686 in 32-bits mode.

Testing of streaming tools

The team has tested the streaming tools on Ubuntu Hardy and the results are as follows :

State of the Streaming Tools on Ubuntu Hardy
Tool State Remarks
Theora Streaming Studio ( ffmpeg2theora ) Button-ok.jpg Works with DV, and with webcams with the ffmpeg-giss package ( SVN r7968 ).
MuSE Button-ok.jpg Works with ogg files, not with mp3s.
IDJC Button-ok.jpg Very complete solution for audio streaming. Works with jack and, thus, with external applications.
Pure Data Button-ok.jpg The most versatile tool to stream audio and video.
Gstreamer Button-ok.jpg Works in command line ( complicated ), we will develop a simple streaming interface using the bindings to Python.
Freej Button-failed.jpg Problems with javascript engine and very difficult to configure and control.
VLC Client Button-failed.jpg The GUI seems unusable and the stream very unstable and error prone.


A list of now available streaming tools is here  : Streaming Tools

Some video editing tools have been tested also with success : Cinelerra, Kino, ...

Development of streaming tools

  • We developped new modules for pd/pdp ( pdp_v4l2, pdp_ieee1394 ) to support more cameras drivers natively.
  • The Pd patches have been improved to include mixing and recording fonctionalities.
  • A development of an interface for GStreamer has been achieved, it comes in two python scripts, one for webcams and one for digital cameras ( firewire ) :

[[[Media:webcamstream.pys]] webcamstream.py] : gstreamer script to stream from a webcam

dvstream.py : gstreamer script to stream from a digital camera ( firewire )

these scripts are also available as an ubuntu package named pygiss, see following section to see how to get it.


Setting up of a package repository

  • Some packages of our tools have been installed in a debian repository for ubuntu / hardy :

deb http://giss.tv/~chevil/ubuntu32 hardy giss

it now contains the following packages :

theorastreamer : Theora Streaming Studio

pd-giss : an extended package of Pure Data, based on pd 0.41

pygiss : gstreamer utilities for streaming

To do

  • Creating Icons and Howtos
  • Make a master of the cd