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

[Emmet Hikory]

Len Ovens wrote:
> Took a while to find any docs for it... in the doc directory of the src
> package. freemix is designed to do live showing switching of videos stored
> as file on the computer like a VJ. I don't know if it can connect to a
> gstream opened by another app or not. But it is not designed for it. It is
> only available as a src package right now.

   Ah, indeed: the demo I saw must have either used named pipes or been
a derivative of the sources currently on launchpad (engine.py would need
extension to directly access non-file sources, although it's all gstreamer).
Packaging this source is fairly trivial, if it's considered particularly
useful: it's a clean setup.py and fairly sensibly licensed.

> However, I tried looking up VJ in synaptic and that spit out "LiVES",
> already in the repos. In it's features page it says "Support for live
> firewire cameras and TV cards". I don't know that we should ship it by
> default, but extra sw yes.

    Unless someone can document a sensible video processing workflow
(VJ, broadcasting, etc.) which is known to be well-done with it, I'm
not sure it ought get any more or less attention than any of the other
audio/video tools in the archive that aren't part of known workflows:
while there's *lots* of software in the archive, and all of it is
presumably useful and used by some folk, the more that we attempt to
call supported (even as "extra sw"), the less I would expect we could
refine the experience to be ideal for accomplishing real tasks.

-- 
Emmet HIKORY