Unofficial Vatican TV Player for Linux: How to see the last days of BXVI as Pontiff in Linux

Given the important events happening today on the Vatican State, and the difficulty of watching the Vatican player on Linux (Silverlight version not compatible with moonlight), I'm building a simpler version that runs on a somewhat standard Linux distribution (Requires Moonlight and possibly the media codecs).

See how to install Moonlight

Right now it only plays the live signal of the CTV(You have to press play twice, seeing the pause symbol on the play button), but I plan to add the archives as well. Please let me know of any inconveniences, or if a better solution exists.

The URL: http://bit.ly/YJGbcm

Improving Beagleboard capture speed on OpenCV

It seems that the capture routines of OpenCV don't perform so well on the Beagleboard. Our  tests were really disappointing, with 2-3 fps on our low vision project.

We had to develop a custom optimized capture mechanism, which retrieves the raw YUYV frames, extracts the Y components, and works from there.

This allow us to grab at full camera speed at 640x480 for a Logitech Pro9000 camera, and we are optimizing to get the full resolution, 1600x1200.  Apparently SDL can be used to grab frames with improved speed, this is something we didn't consider.

PS: To have better information, see my next post