Plug-in for MainActor Sequencer is available. It provides, in some circumstances, timeline playback directly to TV output of video capture cards DC10plus, LML33 and Buz. Plug-in can be dowloaded here: http://www.cicese.mx/~mirsev/Linux/DC10plus/MA-Zoran-0.0.4.tar.gz System requirements =================== - Operating system Linux with kernel 2.2.x or 2.4.x. - Zoran driver http://www.cicese.mx/~mirsev/Linux/DC10plus/ - MainActor 3.55 or 3.6 for Linux http://www.mainconcept.com/mainactor.shtml - Zoran 36060 based TV capture/playback card: DC10plus from Pinnacle Systems, LML33 from LinuxMediaLabs or Buz from Iomega. General information =================== The plug-in intercepts MJPEG compression and decompression calls from MainActor and sends compressed JPEG frames to hardware providing capability to watch 'maseq' timeline on the TV monitor connected to the TV capture/playback card. Plug-in also fixes the problem of reversed field order with respect to the AVI format used by Pinnacle System Software for Windows thus making clips captured in Windows fully compatible with maseq program. This plug-in will give you more convenience when editing movies in maseq, providing the capability of monitoring the timeline frames on a TV monitor at full resolution. If your system is fast enough, maseq may be able to playback the timeline at full speed. Limitations =========== MainActor Sequencer, to the best of my knowledge, was not designed to use such external third party plug-ins and, therefore, not everything on the timeline can be watched on TV monitor. Also, maseq may not be able to play all frames from the timeline at full speed. This, of course, will prevent you from using this plug-in for playing the timeline back directly to VCR. In most cases, you will still need to render entire movie into MJPEG AVI file to play it back using, for example, lavplay program from lavtools or mjpegtools packages (http://mjpeg.sourceforge.net). There are even more limitations when the MA project picture size is 720x480 for NTSC or 720x576 for PAL. In this case, the internal image format in maseq is DV. Therefore, another codec is used for rendering and playback, and only true MJPEG AVI files in the timeline can be watched on a TV monitor. Acknowledgements ================ This work would never be done without information kindly provided by Sergej R. Grigoriev, author of MJPEG codec for MainActor suite. I would like, also, to thank MainConcept for the best, from my point of view, nonlinear editing tool available for Linux operating system.
