Tomasz Chmielewski wrote:
Richard schrieb:Hi AllHas anyone tried to use a NSLU2 for video streaming, ie connect a web cam to it and use it as a streaming server. I'd like to be able to video an object exploding , stream the video to another computer, sample at a high rateand then play it back slowly. has anyone already done any thing similar ??I used to experiment with video streaming on ASUS WL-500gP (266 MHz, 32 MB RAM, mipsel arch).I used vlc for video transcoding and streaming and Philips USB camera. The device was swapping a bit and was a bit slow.You say you want high rate to film an exploding object - you may have trouble with that with NSLU2, I guess.
I would think so. In particular, it will (a) be difficult to find an off-the-shelf webcam with a useful frame rate (b) that won't also swamp the NSLU2's bandwidth-constrained, floating-point-challenged processor which at the same time is (c) overwhelmed with pushing what data it can out over TCP/IP through a bandwidth-challenged ethernet implementation to another machine.
I'm not really an authority on such matters, though. Just my $0.02 after working with other, comparable processors and other platforms.
I looked at some solutions out of curiosity once, and discovered that a lot of the high-speed streaming camera implementations used for this kind of thing actually bolt the camera core right to the CPU over DMA, and then "stream" the raw frames to SRAM. An offline process then pushes those frames out over a fast link (Firewire? SCSI?) to another processsor with the memory and horsepower to turn them into streaming-compatible formats. Or they do the compression with FPGAs. Big ones. :)
These were 1000s of frames per second-type systems intended for scientific work, though. Maybe beyond what you're after, but even a cinematic-quality experience is probably beyond the NSLU2.
b.g. -- Bill Gatliff bgat@billgatliff.com