Open Video Developers Toolkit
TSS (Theora Streaming Studio) is an excellent encoder for sending Ogg Theora streams to an Icecast server. There is a home page for TSS that is worth reading for an overview of what it does and there are also installers available :
http://gollum.artefacte.org/tss/
TSS is a GUI (graphic user interface) encoder, which means you don't have to do anything tricky on the command line. TSS can send out one or two streams with different settings, from the same video source. The video source can be digital video (DV) or analog video via a video capture device such as a webcam, USB video-in or video card with video-in. Bear in mind that a fast computer with at least 2gig ram will be required to stream to 2 targets without frame drops or loss of audio synchronisation.
TSS can also display a preview of the outgoing stream, and can simultaneously archive the streams to disk (but that depends a little on how good your computer is).
TSS actually manages the command line softwares :
- dvgrab - grabs the video from a live video source such as a camera
- ffmpeg2theora - converts video files to Ogg Theora
- oggfwd - sends the video to a streaming server
TSS simply takes the configuration you set in the GUI and creates the appropriate command line using these three softwares so you don't need to enter in complex commands manually.
One can always copy the command line being used by TSS, it will be printed out on the status window, the small black space we can see above under the Execute and Stop buttons. Simply scroll your mouse pointer and select the text. You could then run this piped commands directly from command line, saving some resources by avoiding launch of the graphical system.
TSS main developer is Lluis Gómez i Bigordà, the current release (February 2009) is 0.2. The project status is active (always good to know!).
Installing TSS
TSS can only be installed on GNU/Linux. We will look at installing TSS on Ubuntu.
First visit the TSS download page :
http://gollum.artefacte.org/tss/#download
Here you will see a section with two links. One link is marked 'Debian / Ubuntu package'. We wish to install this version. Click on this link using FireFox and you will see a window appear like this :
The option selected by default is what we want to use. If we open the installer with GDebi Package Installer, then the installer will download and install automatically...sounds easy! So lets do this. Simply click 'OK' and it will install.
Installing on 64 bit
When installing TSS you might see an error like this :
This means you are trying to install the software on a computer with a different 'architecture' than allowed by the software. Actually you can bypass this but you have to do it on the command line. First, instead of using GDebi you need to download the sources (.tar.gz file). Then from the same directory as where the installer is located you need to type this on the command line :
sudo apt-get install dvgrab ffmpeg ffmpeg2theora libtheora-bin oggfwd libvte-dev
The above command might take a while as there is a lot to download and install. When the process is complete follow this with these commands :