StreamMinder / News: Recent posts

My thanks go out to user Aditya for pointing out a fatal bug in how StreamMinder is using the result of QFileDialog::getExistingDirectory() in recent versions of Qt. I've hacked a fix and made it available in the Git page. A source tarball for release 0.7 will be coming soon to the Files page.
In other news, I added a Git page.

As seen on Linux Weekly News (http://lwn.net/Articles/288824/), the 2.6.26 Linux kernel will include the UVC driver. For people wanting to use a webcam under Linux, this means the hardest step of getting it working will be taken care of automatically. No more need to search online for the module source, download it, compile against your current kernel, and place the module binary where the kernel will find it. At most, all you'll need to do is add the module name to your /etc/modules (or similar) file to ensure it's loaded at boot time.

Tom just made a new release of MJPG-streamer that supports spca5xxx-based cameras, in addition to UVC cameras. (See http://mxhaard.free.fr/spca5xx.html for a list of spca5xxx cameras.) If you have such a camera and would like it to appear in the list of devices in StreamMinder, e-mail me so I can get the details needed to make it work. It should be a simple matter, but since I don't have one of those cameras, I can't do it by myself.

Since pushing out the beta release of StreamMinder yesterday, I've decided to see what needs to be done with MJPG-streamer to get better interaction between the two programs. Specifically, I've been wanting to get MJPG-streamer's startup output to appear in one normal-looking message box, rather than a bunch of error messages.

Well, that turned out to be pretty simple by doing a quick-and-dirty hack on MJPG-streamer's source. I've proposed the changes to Tom; in the meantime, try out the mod for yourself:
http://zelmo.sytes.net/mjpg_streamer

I've put up a user guide in this project's "Web Site" area, and made some adjustments to the code. From what I can see, it works pretty well now. I'm declaring it beta as of this release.

You can now download a pre-compiled binary, if you don't feel like compiling it. So even if you can't read a line of C++, you can still try out the program and raise any issues in the forums.

I'd like all the input I can get from everyone at this point. From what I can see, there's very little left to do before the 1.0 release, but I'm sure other people will see things that I haven't.... read more

Really, version 0.4 is done and has been tagged in my local repository. Watch for it on the downloads page as soon as SourceForge's FTP server comes back online.

This version fixes a bug that prevented MJPG-streamer from starting again after it had already been started and stopped, and adds some very basic validation of user input. This should be the last alpha release.

The upcoming 0.5 release is intended to mostly add documentation, which for now will be Web-based. The documentation for the 1.0 release should be built-in, using either Qt Assistant or a basic QTextBrowser window. There will also be some touch-ups, as can be expected for all of the beta releases.

I'm pleased to present StreamMinder-0.3, the first alpha release. See the README for what makes this alpha software. (Hint: It's summarized in this new post's title.)

Another good weekend day gave me a few hours to work on StreamMinder, so I've got it to a state where all that's left to do to get it working is implement the command execution. I've tagged version 0.2; the next release, due within the next week, will bring it into alpha status, where the real testing begins.

I've finally managed to put out the 0.1 release of StreamMinder, after struggling yesterday with SourceForge's FTP server. This is pretty much just the GUI, with very little else in the source code (just a couple of signal/slot connections).

In the meantime, I've been working toward a 0.2 release and have that almost ready to go. There's still no functionality, but I expect to put out a 0.3 release within a week that will actually do something.