[TBA]: Comprehensive Video Archiving

[Jonathan Norris]

Originally Posted by StevenB

I would like to see an easy way for matches to be recorded, parsed, and uploaded in real time. I'm hoping to work on something like this over the summer, and possibly give it a test run at one or two off-season events.

The basic idea consists of a PC and a generic USB video capture device. The PC runs software that detects the beginning and end of the matches based on the bell and buzzer sound effects, and parses the video accordingly. Between matches (or in the background, if it's a multi-core machine), the video is compressed and uploaded.

Ideally, there would be a Linux LiveCD and a list of compatible capture devices, such that a user could take any laptop, pop in the CD, plug in a capture device, connect to the Internet, and start sending video directly to TBA.

Its a great idea, but its going to take a lot of effort to make that work. The hardest parts are going to be making it use any video source and the whole listening for the bell rings... It would probably be easier to standardize on one cheap video capture device like a Pinnacle Dazzle or something thats widely available.

It could probably be done relatively simply on a mac, I use VideoGlide which allows me to hook up a variety of USB video capture devices, manually use Quicktime X to make a movie recording of each match (someone would have to start and stop each match recording), if these video settings aren't optimal use an script to watch a folder where the original video is saved to and encode that video with specified handbrake settings, then send it to FFMPEG to encode the flash video and create a JPEG, then send all that to the FTP... Yea it gets complex pretty quickly.