the automated recording of a television show

Submitted by drewzhrodague on Tue, 2006-12-19 11:55.

I had decided to automate television shows in a few specific ways, after taking a trip with a friend to pick up a used and decommissioned television studio. I thought about it for a long time, and came up with a long document describing how to do it. Unfortunately, some kids at some university whipped up an implementation before I was able to do it, and so I kinda backed off a bit. One thing that has been a result of my thoughts, is to automate the recording of a live news/talk show, without the need of a cameraman, or editing.

I propose to do this with a couple of scripts -- one that does the recording, and one that does the timing for the audio and cue playback. This doesn't seem too hard, except that I can't figure out how to record from any of the (now numerous) collection of webcams.

Each camera has a different driver, which wouldn't be so bad if they weren't only compatible with the demo and test applications that came with them -- and none of them will record to disk without xwindows, making it a problem to use a headless autonomized machine.

I'll continue working on this, and populate this space with more information as it comes up.

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Mencoder and the Quickcam Express
Submitted by drewzhrodague on Wed, 2007-01-31 11:51.

I really like mplayer, as it plays just about anything I can find on the 'net. and it blew my mind when I realized that there was another half to mplayer: mencoder. I did have a really hard time trying to figure out why ffmpeg wouldn't record from any of my webcams. It would complain about there not being a V4L2-compatible device, and I couldn't figure out how to force it to use a V4L device. Ah, well.

I'm still not there yet, but I am able to get about 5fps from the quickcam. One of the things I noticed about the Quickcam Express driver for Windows, is that it specifies it as a YUY2 encoding -- and the framerate under Windows Movie Maker at 15fps is really what I want out of the webcam.

Is there a way to force mencoder to read the YUY2-encoded image? I hope so. I'd really hate to use Windows Movie Maker, or a big bloated video-editing engine. I'm still going for full automation.

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Segments and Formats
Submitted by drewzhrodague on Wed, 2007-03-21 10:24.

The initial show will be a series of short segments, and probably a set-length. Short segments will be commercial-length (30-seconds), while some of the longer segments will be up to 5 minutes.

This being a variety show, it should include segments similar to those of every other kind of show. The individual slices should be able to stand on their own (YouTube, etc), and also work together into a television 1/2 hr show, and a 1 hr show. Since the television-formatted shows are built from smaller segments, they can be cut for commercials quite easily.

Graphics and Titling are to be specific to each segment, but may also be tied into the main show, or regenerated as part of the show-compilation process. This will be handled by metadata associated with the particular segment.

And this is where the scope of the project becomes vast. Each segment has an associated set of metadata stored in a new XML microformat, which is a segment descriptor. This contains such information as the segment's title, actors (if any), format, scene, license, and other data, and can even reference other discriptors for (digital) actors, scenes, and even individual shots. All of the metadata can be used to regenerate a particular segment more tailored to its encompassing show.

This is going to require a library of XML, and a show-compiler. The show compiler shouldn't have to be much more than a set of shell scripts, unless a realtime-generation would be needed. In that case, a well-writen C application is required. The show compiler would read-in the metadata for a particular show (new show for Monday, process any additional or supplimental metadata (use previously unused segments, use a halloween theme on the titles, prefer segments tagged with 'Monday'), and output the specified show (AVI or MPEG2, etc).

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