Palantir - Streaming Video on WL-500g

[WlanMan]

Hi

I got Palantir, the Streaming Audio and Video Server running on the 500g, now getting rid of the buggy activex stuff and adding audio and live video.

Will post the Bins tomorrow.

http://www.fastpath.it/products/palantir

Greets

[hugo]

I'm waiting eagerly for it! Thanks for your work

[WlanMan]

Hi

Decompress it to the root of an external flashdisk or harddisk , and then cd to
/tmp/harddisk/palantir/bin , there you can start it with ./palantir .
The configuration is tested with a Philips Vesta Pro.
You need to disable webcam from web interface and insmod videodev.o and pwc.o manualy before starting palantir.
You can open the firewall outwards with "iptables -I INPUT 2 -p tcp --syn --dport 3000 -j ACCEPT" and "iptables -I INPUT 2 -p tcp --syn --dport 3001 -j ACCEPT".
palantir -h gives some runtime-adjustable settings.

Have fun
P.s: I Would be glad to hear if Audio is working, the sound part of the cam is working with the kernal, and palantir taps into it but on my tests i cant hear anything.

[hugo]

This is working great; I'm looking into the sound and maybe a higher resolution using pwcx

I'm also posting a tool that might be of help for your cam to tweak white balance and other parameters.

[hugo]

Anybody got this file? pwcx-8.2.2.tar.gz

I can only find gentoo linux pre compiled files. I'm looking for the real sources. This would allow 320x240 on palantir

[Oleg]

you mean 640x480?
read nemosoft page, pwcx are binaries, there is no sources available.

[hugo]

Sources are available for version 9 but the firmware only have version8. Pwcx will only work with same version of pwc drivers. There is a precompiled lib necessary to make the kernel module, but you still need to make the module by itself.

You need to use pwcx for 320x240 if framerate is set over 5 fps, which is the case on vesion compiled by Wlanman. This is from palantir website FAQ.

Version 9 is not specific to kernel 2.4.20, but the version I requested is.

[Oleg]

hm, well probably I've wrong impression... But anyway, pwc has a binary only part used for compression/decompression.
Also, there was a link posted in the forum with a link to driver, based on the pwc sources, but which has decompression reverse-engineered.

[Oleg]

hugo, have you read this (http://www.smcc.demon.nl/webcam/):

As most of you probably know, the driver consists of two parts, PWC which is available as source and part of the kernel, and PWCX, the binary-only decompressor part. PWC itself works, but with limitations in framerate and resolution; to get the full benfits of the cam, you must use PWCX.

[WlanMan]

You need to use pwcx for 320x240 if framerate is set over 5 fps, which is the case on vesion compiled by Wlanman. This is from palantir website FAQ.

5 Frames ? I dont saw it on the page.
Reducing framerate to 5 frames should be ok, i got a maximum of 8 frames/s out of my setup in open-loop view.
OV511 cam results would be nice.

Has someone a Logitech Orbit cam ? Palantir can controll her pan/tilt system remoute .
Hugo: Your setpwc has the wrong device path compiled in, /dev/v4l/video0

Greets
p.s: Sysfeed is working, pipe can be created with "mknod /tmp/telmu_pipe \p"

[hugo]

About my setpwc, sorry for the bad setup. Please use the -d /dev/v4l/video0 option to make it work, before running palantir.

About 320x240, you can try by yourself: I have a cannot open SWIN device, which is a need for compressed stream from pwcx.
A download from the tarball from pwcx maker show a need for pwcx at 320x240 over 5 fps (it's in an html file in the site folder in pwc tarball)

The server dies with "Fatal error: SWIN: No such file or directory". What can I do?

Your camera is most likely using the pwc driver.
 In this case, the "No such file or directory" error text is a bit misleading. The correct interpretation is that a capture mode (combination of resolution and frame rate) which requires compression was requested, but the driver does not know how to support it.
 To support compressed capture modes, you have to insmod the pwcx companion driver. Being distributed in binary-only form due to license issues, it is not included in the Linux kernel source tree, and not all distributions include it in compiled form either (Debian, for example, does not). You can download it at http://www.smcc.demon.nl/webcam/.
 The pwc site also has (well, used to have) a comprehensive list of uncompressed (in green) and compressed (in red) video capture modes. By default, Palantir tries to initialize the camera at 320x240, 30 fps - which the driver can't handle without compression. So, if pwcx is not an option, you can try to lower the capture resolution (use the proper command-line or configuration file option) or the frame rate (which, unfortunately, at the moment requires editing one of the source files; see video.c around line 209).

[Oleg]

Found it - http://www.saillard.org/linux/pwc/
Hope somebody owning pwc will try compiling and using this

[hugo]

I tried already this one, but they looks like made for 2.6 kernels. I haven't made them successfully so far (but I'm no expert!)

[WlanMan]

Hi

Lowering to 10fps should be ok i think, i got not much more out of the device here.
This is palantir with background darkstats and ftp transfer running. ftp speed was around 400k and stable.

Dec 26 13:42:30 [http] 192.168.1.20:1239: wrote 214 [+0] frames (685369 bytes) in 39.20 s - 5.46 f/s, 17.07 kB/s, 3.13 kB/f
Dec 26 13:42:30 [main] Capture thread stopped - 231 frames in 42.58 s (5.42 f/s)
Dec 26 13:42:30 [main] 0 client(s) connected

And this without massive backgrond jobs:

Dec 26 13:46:47 [http] 192.168.1.20:1353: wrote 151 [+0] frames (484060 bytes) in 15.38 s - 9.82 f/s, 30.73 kB/s, 3.13 kB/f
Dec 26 13:46:47 [main] Capture thread stopped - 191 frames in 19.53 s (9.78 f/s)
Dec 26 13:46:47 [main] 0 client(s) connected

Greets

[hugo]

I changed the line 209 in video.c and replaced 30 by 5. After making it, I can run palantir succesfully and get one picture, but then I get a segmentation fault. Did you experience the same behaviour on your source, or did you make some modifications to make it work?

BTW, I cannot make the pwc version 10.0.6a source. I stil havent found how to redirect to opt kernel source instread of my linux distro ones.