[pvrusb2] NSLU2 + PVRUSB2 = Bird-Box Cam

[Phil Endecott]

Dear PVRUSB2 people,

Thanks to Mike and friends for their work on this driver, which is key
to my "geeky project of the season" - a bird-box cam!  Let me explain...

For the last couple of years a pair of bluetits have raised a family in
the nest box on the side of my house.  I was able to watch them first
bringing nest materials and later food for the chicks from my bedroom
window.  But that wasn't enough - I wanted to see inside the box - and
last weekend I borrowed a ladder, drilled a hole in its roof and fitted
a wireless camera.  The birds should be arriving in the next few weeks
and I plan a "live webcast" of the whole thing.

At the other end of the (analogue) wireless link I have a PVRUSB2,
connected to an NSLU2.  If you're not familiar with the NSLU2, aka Slug,
it's a Linksys product with a 266MHz XScale processor, 2 USB2.0 ports
and ethernet, running Linux.  The plan is that the NSLU2 will grab the
video from the PVRUSB2 and upload it to my co-located web server.

The PVRUSB2 worked first time, which was great, except that the NSLU2
crashed ten minutes later.  This was very repeatable; the NSLU2, which
was normally rock-solid, would lock up about ten minutes or so after any
PVRUSB2 activity.  Unfortunately it's not easy to see any kernel panic
message on the NSLU2 but I have some parts ordered so that I can connect
to its serial port; if that reveals anything I'll post again.  But is
anyone aware of anything with a ten minute timeout, or anything of that
sort?  I did wonder if the PVRUSB2 was going to sleep, or something.

My NSLU2 had been running Debian, but in an effort to track down the
cause of the crash yesterday I installed an OpenEmbedded-based
distribution on a new flash stick.  This is running exactly the same
kernel image and modules as the Debian system, but doesn't crash!  The
mystery deepens.  What can be different?  The hotplug scripts, perhaps?
  A Debian cron job was my first guess, but it still crashes with cron
off.  Anyway, I can now look at the other parts of the system.


My motivation for using the PVRUSB2 was of course its built-in MPEG2
encoder; software encoding on the NSLU2 would have been very
challenging.  But it has the disadvantage of inflexibility compared to a
software encoder.  Here are some of the particular issues that I've
encountered; does anyone have any suggestions?

- Capturing still images: I'd like the web page to include still images
as well as video clips.  I think that the only way to do this is to read
from the MPEG stream until I've got the first frame, and then convert it
  to a JPEG.  Doesn't the Connexant chip have a way to read the raw
framebuffer, bypassing the MPEG encoder?  (Is this functionality present
in the Windows driver?)  Is there a computationally-easy way to convert
an MPEG frame into a JPEG - they both use DCTs, don't they?

- Motion detection: since I have limited bandwidth between the NSLU2 and
the web server (wrong way on an asymetric cable modem), I'd like to
record clips when something interesting happens.  This means doing
motion detection, or similar, on the NSLU2.  I bet that the connexant
chip internally has a good idea of an image activity metric, but we
can't get at it.  There is a Linux program called "motion", but I think
it needs an unencoded video source.  Is there a computationally-cheap
way to do motion detection on an MPEG stream?  Maybe, if
variable-bit-rate encoding is used, I could just look for a spike in the
bit rate.  Any comments?

- The light level in the birdbox is rather low.  The camera has
automatic gain control and the image looks OK, but it has the sort of
noise you expect from a cheap sensor when it is being amplified a lot.
The only problem with this is that it wastes bits in the MPEG stream.  I
noticed that there are some noise reduction parameters in
pvrusb2-encoder.c, but they don't seem to be exported to the /sys
interface.  Is this what I need?


OK, thank you for reading this far.  I'd be interested to hear from
anyone who's using a PVRUSB2 in a similar sort of application.

Regards,

Phil.