AVview

* Overview

* Watching TV
XXand movies
* Supported cards

* ati.2
* TV output
* AVview
* km
* drm-kernel
* ati_remote

* Tools and
XXapplications

* Status
* Mailing lists
* CVS
* Download

* Screenshots

* Hall of fame

Overview

AVview is a Tcl/Tk extension which provides interface to Audio/Video devices on Linux. (Note to BSD folks - yes it is possible to support you too - someone with FreeBSD needs to write the appropriate code). The goal is to have an efficient Audio/Video processing engine which is controlled by Tcl/Tk interface.

Why Tcl/Tk ?

• We need scriptability to make AVview configurable enough. There are too many choices for the application to decide which is best. An application like Xawtv or Xine is great for a desktop user - but it is not convenient to use in a settop box where, aside from the font issue, the user might want to present different menus or provide some additional choices.
• Tcl/Tk is the only Unix/Linux GUI which is natively scriptable. It is highly configurable and the widgets look nice too.
• Tcl/Tk is easy to learn - it is similar in syntax to csh and tcsh Unix shells.
• Tcl/Tk license is compatible with both GPL and XFree86 licenses.
• Using Tcl/Tk allows us to isolate the engine code from the user interface.

Installation

• Download AVview from our download area or from CVS.
• Optionally, download and install FFmpeg (for video capture) and ALSA 0.9.x (for Audio). It is recommended that you use ffmpeg tarball that has been packaged for your AVview version, but feel free to experiment with latest ffmpeg CVS.
• Configure avview by issuing

       ./configure --with-ffmpeg=/path/to/your/compiled/ffmpeg/tree
  

  and this means the place you run ffmpeg configure script in (Note: newer versions of ffmpeg seem to allow running configure outside of ffmpeg source tree. This is not supported by AVview compile scripts).
• Compile AVview by typing make
• To start AVview type avview.scp in the same directory.

Notes

• You can make AVview control window appear on a computer different from the one you are running AVview on by using the following command line:

        avview.scp control=remotehost:0.0
  

  (the part after control= is just the regular DISPLAY name. The remote computer does not have to run Linux, the only requirement is support for X)
• AVview will not compile cleanly against ffmpeg 0.4.5. You have to use a later version.
• When you hard disk is full the AVview will not abort capture but will start filling the FIFO in RAM. If the size of the fifo increases past the alotted limit the capture will be aborted. This gives you some time to free up some space..

TODO list for CVS code

• ...