live video switching (was: Linux Tools for Serious Photographers)

[Emmet Hikory]

Len Ovens wrote:
> I don't find SW to handle 3 or
> more input streams and do on the fly switching. (I think we used closer to
> 7 or 8 streams... though our switchers had more.. they had access to every
> stream in the building)

    Assuming one is either willing to play with *lots* of gstreamer pipelines,
or can pre-cache streams in one way or another, freemix can handle this sort
of thing: I've stood behind someone using it to select video at a club, and
they had multiple streams/previews running locally, switching which was on
the main screen regularly.

    Upstream used to be active in Ubuntu, and was postponing having it in the
repositories for reasons I forget, and I'm unsure of the current state (or of
whether the branch I saw used live happens to match anything downloadable).
I don't expect there are licensing issues blocking inclusion.

    While I'm not sure it's appropriate for broadcast use (where one often
wants to have *multiple* simultaneous output streams and realtime overlays),
it may be useful for other applications, and provide a foundation for
similar applications in the same domain.  Hardware support for the sorts of
tactile interfaces that make realtime video switching an acceptable task
may also need to be added.

https://launchpad.net/freemix

-- 
Emmet HIKORY