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TV Tuner Screencaps to Web?


sentinel

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Ok, I need your creativity.

At work we have monitors which show which rooms are occupied at any given time. Not video, just a diagram of the room layout, and occupied ones will be a different colour.

If you're having trouble picturing it, just think of the arrival/departure screen at an airport. Not the same thing, but a similar idea - video that changes, but not that often.

There are monitors all around the building like this, but that's *so* 1990s! I want to hook it up to one of our internal web servers.

Ideally what I want is pretty simple: I don't need full streaming video, I just want it to take a cap of a single frame of the video (screenshot) at regular intervals (like every 30 seconds, or 5 minutes, or whatever) and copy it to the web server. Either one running locally on that box, or another one on the network.

I'd love to hear ideas for both Windows and Linux, but I'll probably end up using Linux. Free is a must.

I generally just Google for this kind of thing, but I'm having trouble finding the results I want.

Thanks for your help! :)

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I've built a quick solution a while ago. It uses gqcam to capture video from a device, saves it in apache's root directory, and is served out to the net.

http://hak5.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1740

It should be easily modified for your needs.

Cool, thanks! It looks good, but I don't think that that Quickcam software can take tv tuner input. And that's the key piece I'm missing.

However, I was able to find this: http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/48671, which is pretty much the same question as mine. If I combine that with your stuff it should be insanely easy.

Actually, as I keep looking I find out that mplayer can do it too, as well as a lot of major video players.

I haven't figured out how to use VLC's Snapshot feature how to do it yet, but I bet it's possible.

All I would need to do is then use something like /dev/video0 as the input to go from a capture card (once the drivers are installed, etc)

Cool, sounds really easy.

Thanks for your help everyone! :)

If anyone has anything else to contribute, feel free - the topic isn't necessarily closed just yet.

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  • 1 month later...
I find the project fascinating and would love to see the final product so check back with us when you've got this sweet hack all put together.

Almost forgot to follow up with this. Another guy in the office ended up using an app called Dorgem with an old AIW on a Windows box. Nice little program actually.

Recently our webmaster did up a quick page for it in PHP which adds a timestamp and the auto-refresh.

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I find the project fascinating and would love to see the final product so check back with us when you've got this sweet hack all put together.

Almost forgot to follow up with this. Another guy in the office ended up using an app called Dorgem with an old AIW on a Windows box. Nice little program actually.

Recently our webmaster did up a quick page for it in PHP which adds a timestamp and the auto-refresh.

Just like on 1x02! :)

Love Dorgem too.

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i dunno if you're still confused, but i found a program somewhere(i really dont know, sorry i cant give credit) called hsg which takes a screenshot and outputs it to http://youripaddress.

its in here somewhere http://www.z4.cn/tools/

however, i do know how much people love opening small exe files.. so you might not bother trying it... but i place my reputation on it not being a virus :D

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I have been looking for a streaming software so that I could stream my TV ati radeon7500. will dorgem work or is it like 1 frame/second? and the link to dorgem is bad. :( I look at it later.

The link works fine for me, Google it if it doesn't work. Dorgem's not made for full-motion streaming, but there's a lot of other programs that are.

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i dunno if you're still confused, but i found a program somewhere(i really dont know, sorry i cant give credit) called hsg which takes a screenshot and outputs it to http://youripaddress.

its in here somewhere http://www.z4.cn/tools/

however, i do know how much people love opening small exe files.. so you might not bother trying it... but i place my reputation on it not being a virus :D

Cool, thanks!

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