[Theora-dev] Re: PC-based video server

[Andrey Filippov]

> On Wed, Jan 26, 2005 at 06:50:49PM -0700, Andrey Filippov wrote:
>
>> In a way - yes, we will be able to go back in time and 'enhance' - not
>> just zoom in realtime as with regular 'digital PTZ' feature - the idea
>> that was invented to cover the gap between the performance of the
>> multi-megapixel image sensors and slow compressors in the cameras /
>> limited bandwidth of networks.
>
> Nice.
>
> BTW, you might want to look at the work on temporal URI and server-side
> seeking for Ogg going on at www.annodex.net. There's both a mod_annodex
> and illi's newer mod_OggChef that might provide a basis or at least some
> ideas for how to handle the server streaming. The on-the-fly theora
> peeling would be a useful feature for a lot of things.
>
>  -r
Thanks, I'll try there.

I was also looking at combining the cameras with Open Graphics card
discussed on Slashdot recently - here are more details.
http://kerneltrap.org/node/4622
For those who are far from the FPGA world - the chip they use in the card
is the same Xilinx Spartan 3 - just twice bigger than the one used in the
camera (that uses about 1/2 of it resources for the Theora compressor).
Unfortunately Timothy Miller in that interview said:

"JA: What information about the card will not be freely available?

Timothy Miller: Nothing of much value to the FOSS Community. The founding
principles of the FOSS community are Free and Open Source SOFTWARE. In
that regard, we are going well beyond the minimum level of disclosure.
Every aspect of the design and interface is being carefully documented and
made freely available. There's not much else to publish. There is the
internal logic of the chip (HDL, Hardware Description Language), but
looking at that would generally be more confusing than helpful to most
people."

If that card was open as the camera (HDL too, not just software) - it
could be possible to use it for high-performance Theora decoder too -
maybe even reuse some of the code from encoder. And then - the card
manufacturers could benefit too - they might use the GPL-ed HDL code -
that idea probably never crossed their mind.