Master Control studio is a TV station in a box. It generates a GUI with mixer knobs and controls for gstreamer plugins playing and mixing live multimedia streams on Linux, helping people rapidly develop, test, and control new multimedia applications.
Visit the Master Control website
create, launch, test, and control running instances of (short list)
- Internet radios
- image slide shows
- DVD players
- HD webcam recorders
- timelapse video recorders
- desktop screen recorders
- spectrum analyzers, oscilliscopes
- live special effects panels
In addition, Master Control can
- edit text with it's built-in editor
- save and load multimedia pipelines
- generate mixer panels, pads, tweak
- combine various effects
Capabilities inherited from GStreamer, not limited to
- splitting audio from video files
- audio filters, mixers, converters
- video filters, mixers, converters
- broadcasting webm, videoconferenceing
- mixing and muxing, streaming live videos
- write files, multiple sources, sinks
- filtering, removing noise
- picture-in-picture, subtitles
- synthesizing speech (requires festival)
- voice recognition subtitles (requires pocketsphinx)
- capturing DV via firewire, transcoding.
- motion sensing
- face recognition (requires openCV)
- ... limitless other things
Master Control is fully cross-platform, open-source, and released under the Gnu Public License, Version 3. The following packages, upon which Master Control depends, may be downloaded, or compiled for just about any operating system.
On Fedora, for example, install these dependencies.
{{{ su -c 'yum -y install pygtk2 gstreamer-python gstreamer-plugins-* gstreamer-ffmpeg pygtksourceview gtksourceview2' }}}
Windows builds of these dependencies are available from ossbuild.
Master Control is maintained on
GitHub. The latest
version may be obtained using git: git clone https://github.com/themanyone/master_control
Or download the .zip file: Download
Master Control's capabilities will continue to grow as new GStreamer plugins become available. We are developing our own motion tracking plugin, and non-linear editing may already be possible via GNonLin.
There is no desktop icon yet. Right-click on the desktop to create one. Launching the program may be done via the Python interpreter.
python master_control.py [args]
New: A file name, or raw pipeline data, may now be supplied on the
command line, similar to gst-launch. Master Control will
automatically determine whether a valid file name, or raw pipeline
description, has been supplied.
Choose a mode from the drop-down menu, for example, simple webcam viewer. The application should start displaying an image from the webcam. The editor's contents will change. Tabs will appear. Clicking on the tabs reveals panels of spin buttons and sliders to tweak and adjust every possible setting of the running GStreamer Pipeline.
Panels may be "popped-out" into their own window from the View menu.
Windows note: ossbuild contains
a build system to support GStreamer for Windows. To make the webcam
work on Windows with ossbuild, change v4l2src to ksvideosrc.
Master Control's HD webcam recorder may not work for everyone. It
assumes the webcam can hardware-encode motion jpeg (MJPEG) video. If
it does not work, try video/x-raw-yuv instead of the image/jpeg
caps, and get rid of the jpegdec decoder. To discover the webcam's
capabilities, use v4l2-ctl --list-formats-ext. In the future, we
may use camerabin, or another such auto-detecing element.
More info about transcoding with Gstreamer.
According to the
[file:///usr/share/doc/gst-entrans-1.0.2/html/howto.html
documentation that installs with entrans], a GStreamer Pipeline is a
directed graph of media handlers or plugins (elements). Each element
has "pads" which are kind of like plugs and sockets that connect them
together. An exclamation point, "!" behaves like a "pipe symbol"
connecting the elements' "src" and "sink" pads. See the man pages for
gst-launch for more information about constructing GStreamer pipelines.
Double-click on v4l2src to highlight it in the Master Control editor.
Press Ctrl+I, or navigate to Help -> Inspect selected. A
search-able window will pop up describing the v4l2src plugin and specifications. This is for convenience. The same information
may be obtained by typing "gst-inspect v4l2src" in a terminal window.
Scroll down to where gst-inspect shows information about brightness and contrast. These values may be specified in the pipeline at startup, or adjusted in the tabs during runtime. Try it out. Change the first stanza in the editor to "v4l2src brightness=200".
Press the F5 key to stop, and re-start (refresh) the stream. This is
the same as pressing the Stop and Play buttons. The interface needs
some help. Right now the fast-forward, loop, and rewind buttons may be found under the Go menu.
Click on the v4l2src tab and adjust values of brightness, and contrast to suit.
Master Control pipelines are equivalent to running entrans in raw mode. There is some rudimentary error handling, and auto-plugging of elements is accomplished by using plugins like playbin and autoaudiosrc. If a pipeline doesn't work, try experimenting. The majority of problems result from mis-matching of elements. Usually, a src or filter element is supplying a format that the next one in the chain does not understand. A good reading of the GStreamer documentation will help to minimize errors.
It is recommended that users inspect (Ctrl-I) the src and sink capabilities (caps) of the elements they wish to connect. Usually, elements will auto-negotiate, but sometimes it is necessary to specify caps, e.g. " ! video/x-raw-yuv,format=(fourcc)I420" between them. Make sure the upstream element in the chain is sending out a format that the receiving elements are compatible with. When there are no matching caps, then some other conversion element, such as "ffmpegcolorspace" may be inserted between elements to supply the matching caps.