[needs-packaging] Boxtream - video recorder & encoder for streamer, Theora IceCast compatible

URL:
http://boxtream.unice.fr/

Description:
Boxtream is a mobile and autonomous audio and video streaming and recording studio. Of course, depending on your own hardware choices, the number and extent of capabilities and the quality of the final results may vary, but at least the software part should be versatile enough to accommodate even the most basic hardware.

Boxtream was mostly designed to stream live courses featuring a professor and his slides (or any other computer based output like software training, web browser, video player...), but can also be used to stream congresses, interviews and the like.

Uses ordinary consumer DV (Digital Video, firewire, ieee1394, Sony iLink) Cameras.
Can use ordinary analog cameras using V4L (feature currently only available in the Development Tree code) - or feed through an AV/DV converter or A/V input on DV camera.
Uses "Scenarios", which are just gstreamer pipelines wrapped up into Python code, and with some fixed element names to link them easily to the remote (or local) GUI.
Can send the encoded audio and video to IceCast streaming servers.
Record more than one camera at once, to hard disk.
Can control some types of Video Switches.
Can overlay text. image overlay is a work in progress.
Dynamic loading of pipelines definitions.
The graphical frontend can be quited and relaunched without stopping the encoder : this way you can continue control from a different location than you started it from. All the encoding parameters are preserved.
You can also connect to the graphical frontend directly from a location on the Internet because you can specify the IP addresses from which it can accept incoming queries.
Easy automation of any task at starting and ending time of each recording : automatic CD/DVD image generation and/or burning, PDF generation from slides capture, re-encoding in other formats and/or qualities, etc... Examples are included.
Written entirely in Python and will work fine everywhere where both python, gstreamer and wxwidgets run.
Works well compared to RealServer.
A schema file in the graphviz dot format is automatically generated to represent a graphical view of your own scenario.

Graphviz see http://www.graphviz.org/

Boxtream only uses hardware which doesn't need any proprietary driver or software.
Our software is written in the Python language and does heavy use of the GStreamer framework. Additional Free Software is installed on the Box, for visioconferencing, non-linear audio or video editing, and so on...

The final audio (currently Ogg/Vorbis) and audio+video (currently Ogg/Theora+Vorbis) streams are both sent to a remote IceCast or compatible streaming server and saved to the backend's local hard disk.

Boxtream is an encoder, somewhat similar to RealProducer, and IceCast is used for serving, which is somewhat
similar to RealServer.

The contact information is :

    Laboratoire STIC Santé (it's an é at the end)
    Faculty of Medicine
    University of Nice-Sophia Antipolis
    Director : Dr. Pascal Staccini - <email address hidden>
    Boxtream project lead : Jerome Alet - <email address hidden>

License:
Boxtream is Free Software distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License of the Free Software Foundation version 3.0 or, at your option, any higher version.