Video

Introduction

Most cameras will stream "raw video" but special media players will be required to view it unless it is first encoded to a format like mpeg, h.264 and wrapped in a container like avi, swf, mp4.

Some cameras have hardware encoders built into the camera and in addition to raw video, can also stream encoded video. The Logitech HD920 has mpeg and h.264 encoders.

Display camera modes

To install Video4Linux on the Pi:

apt-get install v4l-utils v4l-conf

To display the video formats the camera supports:

v4l2-ctl --list-formats

To turn auto focus off and manually set the focus:

/usr/bin/v4l2-ctl --verbose --set-ctrl=focus_auto=0
/usr/bin/v4l2-ctl -d 0 -c focus_absolute=25

Install ffmpeg

1. Install h.294 library libx264

git clone git://git.videolan.org/x264.git
cd x264
./configure --enable-static --enable-shared *See Note 1 below.
make
make install
ldconfig

2. Install ffmpeg

git clone git://source.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg.git
cd ffmpeg
./configure --enable-gpl --enable-libx264  --enable-libfreetype *See Note 2

make
make install
ldconfig

NOTES

1. Disable the assembler when compiling on the Pi[1]:
   

./configure --disable-asm --enable-shared

1. Disable on the Pi

./configure --enable-shared --enable-gpl  --enable-libx264   --enable-libfreetype --disable-mmx