Application Note. Introduction to VLC Media Player on Ubuntu Linux. By: Jianying Tang

Transcription

1 Application Note Introduction to VLC Media Player on Ubuntu Linux By: Jianying Tang 1 P a g e

2 Table of Contents Abstract and Keywords...3 Introduction and Background...3 How to install VLC media player...4 How to connect the Logitech camera with VLC media player.5 Magnifying & Zooming video with VLC media player.8 Conclusion..9 References P a g e

3 Abstract: Media player is playing a quite important role in modern life. It is the most useful tool of communication that can help us promoting the right things on right time. Whenever it come to serve on design or development of high- tech products on the basis of engineering aspects, it is necessary to explore several functions or features that may be strange and not hear before. This Note will be providing basic information on VLC media players and couple of useful features for capturing output video files generated by FFMPEG on Ubuntu Linux. It will be also discussing how to install the VLC media player step by step, how to connect the Logitech camera with VLC media player as well as how to magnify or zoom in/ out for capturing unclear street signs of recorded video. Keywords: These keywords may be included in the paper: VLC media player, Logitech C310 camera, Magnification on video, Ubuntu OS (operating system) and FFMPEG. Introduction and Background: Nowadays, there are increasingly amount of media players available in market for users to choose from. Among existing media players, different types of media players may have issue of operating system compatibility according to different operating systems the computer have. However, the VLC media player is the most powerful medium that can play almost all different kinds of video files on Ubuntu Linux. By introducing VLC media player indicated in figure 1, it is a free and open source cross-platform multimedia player and framework that are able to play majority of multimedia files such as DVD, Audio CD, VCD, and various streaming protocols. In this note, some of features such as the Connection with webcam and magnification on video will be introduced. Figure 1 3 P a g e

4 How to install VLC media player: 1. First of all, make sure your computer has installed the Ubuntu OS, and the installation is running under Linux. 2. If you do not have Ubuntu OS, you have to download the installer package from the website: Once that s done, we can just double click on it and begin the installation process. 3. Open up your Linux desktop and go to the terminal as it show in figure 2. Figure 2 4. Next, we want to use sudo command code to prompt the installation. So, just go ahead and type out sudo apt-get install vlc, and later it will ask for password for user to install. Type out the root password and continue the process. 5. After we get logging with administrator password, the package will be downloaded from Linux terminal, and the list of extra package files such as liba , libdvbpsi4, libebml0 are included. The system will ask you whether it should to be continue or not, so we just type the Y to continue. The figure 3 shows the detail to the terminal. 4 P a g e

5 Figure 3 6. So, the program will be executing the installation process, later it will tell the user that installation process has already been completed. 7. The final step is to launch the VLC media player and finish up the installation process as it has been shown in figure 4. Figure 4 How to connect the Logitech camera with VLC media player The reason why VLC media player is an outstanding medium is not only because of the playability on all the captured video from car infotainment and navigation system, but instant recordings or stream live video feeds from webcam. Beside the great 100% compatibility with Linux system, the quality of video played with VLC is clear and wonderful. In order to provide instant creditable information during driving test, we have to achieve synchronous playback between Logitech camera C310 (Current testing camera) and VLC media player. There are few steps to setup: 5 P a g e

6 1. First of all, we need to open up VLC media player and go to media tag to click Capture Device shown in figure 5. Figure 5 1. In the next step, we have to configure the capture mode, the default of mode for captured video in Linux system is Video for Linux 2, and the video device name should be pop up as /dev/video0 under device selection in figure 6. Figure 6 By doing this way, the video device is able to connect to VLC player so that the instant recording will be executed. Another easy way to turn on connection between Logitech webcam and VLC media player is to configure the custom shortcut. In that way, we can save much time and switch to live stream video more quickly. 1. First of all, click the system setting in your Linux desktop, and then go to keyboard. 6 P a g e

7 2. In the keyboards, you can go to shortcuts and roll down to select the Custom shortcuts. After you double click on vlc(as webcam), a small window should be bomb up, make sure the name is vlc (as webcam) and the Command is vlc f v4l2:// /dev/video1 in figure 7. Figure 7 3. After you put that in, you have to define the operation of shortcut. As the example show above, you can use Alt+super+V to execute the live streams. 4. So, we are now connecting the logitech webcam with VLC media players, you should see the live video recording all the time. Here is just an example how it looks like in figure 8. Figure 8 7 P a g e

8 Magnifying & Zooming video with VLC media player One of problem with output video generated by FFMPEG in Linux is unclear and fuzzy street or road signs. Despite the fact the best solution to solve video quality can be improvement on camera itself, the VLC provide a remarkable feature of magnification or zoom in/ out that can improve vision to view the characters or numbers on street or road signs. Basically, user is able to zoom in or out video to look up the specific detail with street signs during instant recording process, or we can change the size of screen based on a series of hotkeys with VLC media player. For magnification on live Webcam, there are two fundamental methods to achieve that, one of them is to apply the Geometry feature. 1. First of all, we can click the Tools in VLC media player, and then click on Effects and Filters 2. We next want to go to Video Effects and go to Geometry. 3. From now on, we need to check the Interactive Zoom, and a white rectangular line should appear to zoom in. User can drag the box to anywhere of screen and a zoomed video is showing on background. A rectangular shape box indicates how large in term of scale the users want to zoom in or out in figure 9. Figure 9 Another method to zoom in or out a webcam video is to apply v412 controls. The steps to approach the magnification of video are similar to Geometry method. 1. Like the Geometry method, we need to click Tools, and then go to Effects and Filters 2. Instead of go to Video Effects, we have to go to v4l2 controls, and it is clear to see there is a Zoom, Absolute at very bottom rows. 8 P a g e

9 3. Go ahead to click on that, we are able to see the changes associate with live video streams according to scale how strong we drag the tag of zooms. There are actually four different settings to zoom modes, which can be represented as 1:1/2, 1:1 original, 1:2 and 1:3 in term of zooming sizes to the windows as it shows in figure 10. Figure 10 For magnification on running video, there is no option to use v4l2 controls. However, some general methods to zooming are useful and helpful. For instance, we can use Alt Numbers for precision such as Alt-1, Alt-2, Alt-3 and Alt-4, and the compiz s zoom would be Alt-5, Alt-6 and Alt-7. In addition, the geometry is still working in this case; we can just simply apply the hotkey Alt-E to get in the Video Effects window and then go to geometry to adjust whether it is zooming in or out. Conclusion: VLC media player is a powerful and user-friendly medium tool that allows the user to play almost all types of multimedia files included in video and audio types and record the live video whenever they get something necessary to capture. In addition, the methods to magnifying or zooming in or out a video are effective and convenient, and it is also useful and helpful to collect characters or numbers on street signs, which is very beneficial to the infotainment and navigation monitor system to get more accurate and précised data of video files on purpose of debugging the errors during driving test. 9 P a g e

10 References: VLC Media Player: FFMPEG: Ubuntu OS: Logitech HD Webcam C310 VLC Media Player Shortcuts 10 P a g e