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Summary
dvgrab 1.3 is a another major update with new features including AV/C interactive mode, automatic detection of camera on any 1394 card, rawdv on stdin, .dif rawdv support, and capture duration option.



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This is a major release prepared by Dan Dennedy that adds AV/C control and
an interactive mode. The default mode of operation is non-interactive to
prevent breaking existing users' scripts. However, dvgrab 1.3 will issue
an AV/C command to tell the camera VTR to start playing. Therefore, dvcont
may no longer be required. However, heed caution! If your camera is not in VTR
mode, but is in camera mode, the play command tells the camera to start
recording!

One enters interactive mode by supplying the -i or --interactive options.
From there, the command prompt describes the single key presses available
to control the camera and start/stop capture.

All dvgrab 1.3 messages are written to stderr (normally connected to your
terminal so you can see them) and include a consistent, easy-to-parse format
for status, event, and error messages.

dvgrab 1.3 can also write raw DV to stdout while simultaneously capturing to
a file. This behavior is automatic when you redirect stdout or pipe the command.
This is especially nice with recent versions of Xine and mplayer as they
can display DV with deinterlacing and adjusting for the non-square pixel aspect
ratio of DV. For example,
dvgrab -i | xine -D stdin://#demux:rawdv

The last part of the Xine MRL in the line above is important; otherwise, xine
does not know the data format of the pipe!

All of the above means one can build a user interface frontend (non-GPL even)
to dvgrab by fork()ing and exec()ing dvgrab with pipes established between the
frontend and dvgrab.

Building upon the pipe capabilities, in non-interactive mode dvgrab 1.3 accepts
raw DV on stdin. If detected, dvgrab forgoes any 1394-based capture method.
This allows one to leverage the file format writing and splitting options of
dvgrab in conjunction with raw DV producers such as smilutils and ffmpeg.

A grand new option is --duration, which specifies a maximum duration for
an entire capture session regardless of splitting. Furthermore, the argument
to this option is specified in SMIL2 time value formats, which is quite
expressive. Note, that in interactive mode, starting capture starts a new
session. Thus, in interactive mode, you can have multiple capture sessions
by stopping and re-starting.

Additional changes include some friendlier defaults and automatic options.
dvgrab 1.3 will look on all your 1394 buses/host adapters for your camera
without the explicit --card opion. It selects the first camera discovered.
Type 2 AVI is now the default file format for increased compatibility with
other applications. Now, supplying --frames and --size options that cause
dvgrab to generate an AVI >1GB automatically enables the --opendml option.
Finally, the base filename argument is optional now too and defaults to
"dvgrab-".

Attached files

dvgrab-1.3.tar.gz
dvgrab v1.3



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