VLC and the HD10U
 

hey ya'll.

something happened that broke my notebook's ability to stream out to my notebooks screen via VLC...re-installed VLC (both the latest release and the latest beta), reinstalled DirectX (9.0c), but the stream won't play locally anymore.

it works on my desktop fine with all the same settings..."default" is selected in the DirectShow tab, and the Stream output box is checked, with "Play Locally" checked in there.

streaming to a TS file also does not work...weird, it was working until recently.

anybody have any idea what could cause VLC to break like that? any codecs or something that's known to interfere?

i hope i am not putting this into the wrong Forum, but i thought the HD10U threads were the most likely to be read by VLC/HD10U users.

BTW, streaming on my workstation works very well...what really made me chuckle last night was streaming to an http port, then opening up the CinemaSix player on the ROKU HD1000 set-top box, pointing it to that http address, and seeing the direct output of the HD10U projected in HD on a 120" screen...wow!

jumped too soon...
 

well, as it so often happens, the answer comes minutes after formulating the question:

i just re-installed my firewire drivers on the notebook...they somehow went to the generic OHCI drivers, which i replaced with the TI drivers, and voila!

sorry for using up the bandwidth on the forum, but maybe it'll help someone in the future.

After many attempts I have never been able to make VLC do HD10 preview stram. Followed all the instructions from the origional post. Any advice?
I have been able to get slowly changing stills (1 new frame per/min out of the video but no constant video.)

hmmm Ken...

yeah, i remember you trying for a while.

it appears to me that there are really only a few components in the chain that need to be in harmony...the camera has to be set to MPEG2 via iLink, the computer's firewire port has to be supported by a driver that's known to be smooth (i know that in audio software the NEC's can be problematic, but don't know what is good and wat is bad in video), DirectX - specifically the DirectShow video and audio parts - have to be installed properly, and your host-computer's CPU speed and memory bandwidth have to be up there in the P4 area...

my notebook is a P4 2.5GHz (400MHz FSB), and my desktop is a 3.2GHz P4 800MHz FSB...both display the stream with about a 2 second delay...so i think that beyond a certain threshold the power of the computer doesn't matter much...what that threshold/lower-end is, i don't know...but i would guess that your setup is pretty decent, and that 1 frame per minute definitely constitutes some problem in the interaction between your DirectX driver architecture and your display driver...

do you have dedicated video memory, or shared memory? can you stream the same MPEG output to the harddisk successfully?

i found that the newest beta does not work properly on my notebook, and that i had to go back to 0.7.2.

well, i'm just wildly shooting into the dark, Ken...my intuition is either a bad firewire implementation on your computer (did you try an IEEE1394 PCI/PCMCIA card?), a bad DirectX install, and/or faulty interaction with your display hardware (graphics driver, memory, etc.).

don't know whether this helps at all...i do hope you get it to work, because it is a very nice way of previewing your scene.

best.
t

Hey Till, thanks for the reply.
Notebook is a 2.6P4 with 768mb ram. We have a 800firewire card which connects to our 160mb Maxtor firewire with no problems as far as speed is concerned.
"DirectX - specifically the DirectShow video and audio parts - have to be installed properly"

Well I have already tried DirectX 9c, after a good long go with 9b, and threr was no difference. How do I properly install the DirectShow parts?
"can you stream the same MPEG output to the harddisk successfully?"
Haven't tried it. You mean within VLC right?
I will try re-insatalling the firewire drivers.

your notebook seems plenty fast...no worries there.

if you installed DirectX 9c, then all codecs and necessary filters should be installed...so i wouldn't suspect any problem there either.

yes, i meant streaming to disk from within VLC...it's a VERY cool feature, that allows you dump any file VLC plays (including network streams from the internet) to your harddisk...you can select to "Dump RAW input", which is useful when you want to - say - dump the i.Link input "as-is", meaning as the HDV MPEG2TS that it is...you can also selct to let VLC transcode whatever it plays and before dumping it to disk...that way, you can for example take the TS stream coming from your camera, and encode it - in realtime - to a DivX encoded AVI file...very nice!

i would try to select the "File" box in the "Open capture Device -> DirectShow -> Stream output -> Settings" panel, and give your file a name like "Test.ts"...you can either select "Dump RAW input", or alternatively selct "MPEG TS" as the encapsulation method...this way, we can be pretty sure that it ends up being a TS conform file (which i guess it is, even as RAW output file...but just to be sure;)

even if you can't "Play Locally" (meaning to the screen), maybe VLC can create a file of the streamed video coming from your camera on disk...if that doesn't work either, then i would definitely snoop deeper into the firewire driver.

i've had a weird behavior, where if i replace the driver of my notebook's internal firewire port (if it works, you should right after the new driver is loaded see "JVC Tape Device" appear in your Windows Device Manager under "Sound, video and game controllers"...then i start VLC, and streaming to the screen works...but if i reboot, the "JVC Tape Device" won't be there anymore (even after turning the camera on and off, un- and re-plugging the cable, etc.)...nothing works right in VLC then (or capture, for that matter)...only after again replacing the *new* firewire driver with the *previous* driver, it will re-appear and all is well again until after a reboot...so i have had to alternate between drivers...i guess refreshing the driver will work as well, coming to think about it.

sorry for the longwinded response, but maybe some of this is also screwy with your card, and maybe trying some of this will help.

good luck! let me know how it goes.
best...