Beta release of Linux capture application

[JamesF]

The problem I have usually found is that the libraries even in recent distributions don't support very much that's useful for writing astro images.  That's why I have to provide a completely separate set of libraries for oacapture to use

RGB recordings are written in the utvideo codec so they can be compressed without data loss.  I think pretty much any other AVI file format supported by the versions of the libraries included in most distributions would be lossy which we really don't want.  Mono data is written in raw mono video format and raw colour data is written as raw colour video).  I don't think support for the last even existed when I started writing oacapture about six months ago.  I have found however that "mplayer" will play the utvideo format files.  It may also require libavformat53 to be installed as well, but that might be a normal dependency anyhow.

So, until the Linux distributions catch up it's going to be a bit of a pain.  Potentially it's possible to relink some of the applications against my versions of the libraries, but I think that may require a complete rebuild of the binary.  I've certainly not had much success getting the existing binaries to load my shared libraries because the versions are so different.

If you're taking the files to Windows for processing however, I've not found a problem yet.

James

[Joseki]

Hi James,

 thanks for your reply - (I must have turned off notifications during the FLO sale, sorry about the late reply).  I think the avi files load okay now, in mplayer at least but "a completely separate set of libraries for oacapture to use" sounds like it means that the files were written okay.  I went ahead and spent a couple of hours collecting Mars, Jupiter and Luna data yesterday so I'm very glad, thankyou (mplayer looked just black though on the files I tried but that's not the point).  Thanks also for the codec pointer.  Most of the computers we have here run Linux though I have just got a Windows 7 laptop with work that I could use if I need to (though I don't yet have admin rights on it ).  I tried opening one avi file on that machine just now but Microsoft media player didn't like it. I would like to keep it all on Linux anyway though and in the long term code up my own processing in Python but that's a different story..

John

[JamesF]

I think for the moment at least we're somewhat stuck with planetary processing on Windows, either directly or via WINE or in a VM.  I'm not sure there's really any other way around that for the time being.  I've never  tried to run AS!2 under WINE, I have to admit.

James