Video capture systems
Contents
Video Capture Systems
- See also Hall C Cameras
- See also Hall C Compute Cluster#Miscellaneous
The video/camera setup in Hall C is accessed through [[1]] or go_cameras.
Note: Users operating inside the Counting House have more access than those outside the fence. [2] only works from within the Hall C subnet.
There are two classes of cameras involved: 'legacy' NTSC cameras (angle cams, etc), and IP/network cameras. The interface/software used to consolidate the systems for the end users is [motion].
NTSC cameras and the Frame-Grabber
- The SHMS and HMS 'Angle cameras' are both legacy NTSC cameras viewing the graduated rail at the rear of each spectrometer.
- The 'Target Camera' (when functioning) is also NTSC.
- The 'HMS Hut' Camera is a legacy NTSC camera.
The video feeds from these cameras is fed into a frame grabber installed in cvideo1 where they are digitized, archived, and served to the user through a combination of 'motion' and a pretty simple web interface manged by a set of cron jobs and perl scripts running under cvideo@cvideo1.
The 'Adlink RTV24' framegrabber has 4 inputs on its PCI card, but can be expanded to handle up to 16 inputs pretty easily. However, this is largely and obsolete technology.
Hall Cameras
The three Hall cameras are IP/Network cameras
- hccam01, hccam03 are Panasonic WV-SC385 units. Good cameras, lousy software, obsolete and no longer sold.
- They can only be configured using Window 7'ish era Microsoft Internet Explorer. Yeah. I manage this using an ancient, locked-down Virtualbox VM (VM is functionally r/o and is only run when the camera firmware needs to be configured.)
- hccam02 is a new Panasonic/Advidia M-200-P Network Camera
- As of this writing, its user interface behaved poorly with the rather old version of Firefox provided by JLab/RHEL7 (newer versions of Firefox work just fine though). For now, Google Chrome was installed on the Hall C cluster as a work-around. 'go_cameras' takes this into account.
Miscellaneous Cameras
There are several other IP/network cameras in use throughout Hall C for monitoring gauges, power supplies etc. They are named 'hccamNN' with NN==04, 05, etc. and require little to no configuration. See the 'motion' configuration on cvideo1 for details.