Technical Details

Note that the binaries assembled for the 2.6 kernel are somewhat sensitive to their environment. The uv 2.0 dynamic release was compiled in a Fedora Core 6 environment for use with DV. However, ALSA audio support is broken in this version. Users on non-FC systems may have better luck with the previous uv-1.4.0 release.

Installation and Usage

To account for old Linux installations, the previous stable release (uv-1.4.0) of the software was compiled under RedHat 8 and is upward compatible to RedHat 9, Fedora Core, and Mandriva 10.x systems. The remaining instructions on this page are generally valid for the most recent builds, although certain features may not work properly. (If you're an outstanding C/Linux programmer in Montreal looking for some interesting work, please drop us a line!)

The bronto*.dyn modules provide dynamic object support so that only a single binary is required for optional feature support. Note that source code is not being provided.

Unpack the tarball with tar -xzf uv-<version>.tar.gz. The Ultra-videoconferencing system is invoked through the uv launch script, which in turn, calls the binary, bronto, so named in honour of the network traffic type it produces: traffic with a very long, heavy tail!

uv -h provides general help and uv -H gives flag-by-flag details.

Ultra-Videoconferencing supports one-way and bidirectional audio and video connections. The download flexibly accommodates OSS and multichannel ALSA audio up to 24 bit, 96 kHz sampling, video input from frame grabbers supporting v4l or v4l2 (e.g. Bt878 chipset), digital video (DV) cameras, and raw IEEE 1394 (dc1394) devices (e.g. Unibrain Fire-i cameras). The video display window may be resized up to full screen.

Note that for stable performance with large video payloads, you may want to increase your IP buffers as described in the FAQ.

Optional JPEG compression can be invoked with the -e j flag for bandwidth-limited connections; full-frame uncompressed analog video requires a minimum of 148 Mbps in the steady-state. Support for standard and high-definition serial digital interface (SDI and HD-SDI) audio and video, is also available. Interested parties should contact us through the fill-in form for further information.

As an example of the software's flexibility, the truly curious user in posession of a sufficiently powerful machine could take a DV source, decode it on the server and recode it as JPEG (uv -D -x -e j). before transmitting to a client.

DV or dc1394 support

If you are planning to use Ultra-Videoconferencing with either a DV or dc1394 camera, you should first ensure that the kernel has Firewire support. In particular, there are a number of Firewire-related kernel modules necessary for operation (video1394 and raw1394). Note that some Linux distributions (e.g. Mandriva) may not create the Firewire devices (/dev/video1394 and /dev/raw1394) automatically, in which case, you should follow the instructions here (courtesy of http://www.videredesign.com).

Next, you have to install the libraries relevant to your specific video needs.

If you're installing an RPM-based distribution (RedHat, Mandriva), you'll probably want to add /usr/local/lib/pkgconfig to your PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable as this is needed during compilation.

Both DV and dc1394 require the following:

For DV support, you will also need to: and for dc1394 support:

Multichannel Audio - ALSA support

ALSA now comes built-in with 2.6 kernels so configuration should not be necessary. For those with older kernels, the following instructions may prove helpful: