Free grabbing software for linux

WebGrab is a tool that acts as a CGI proxy. It simulates a Web browser and grabs data from external programs, and can exchange individual words or whole blocks.

The project can be run standalone or in conjunction with phpCMS.

libbgrab is a framegrabber library for Linux using the v4l driver and bt/conexant analog SD video input cards.

To implement constant throughput and to avoid frame loss delays, triple buffering is used through local buffer copying in a separate grabbing thread.

The library consists of two parts that are usually used together:

1. framegrabber access (bgrab.c/bgrab.h)
2. xwindows output (xutils.c/xutils.h)

Additional routines allow for image processing:

3. Motion JPG compression (RTjpeg.c, RTjpeg.h, mmx.h)
4. MMX optimized image filters (asm/*)

Examples and Demo Programs:

Note: All demo programs are hardcoded for Tuner/NTSC input. You have to modify the code and recompile for other inputs!

+++ testgrab

See demo program "testgrab" for a quick intro on how to use libbgrab. See
source code comments for additional usage notes. The source code will
probably have to be edited to adapt for your video input - it is just a
demoprogram! Use Q to quit with the live-video window active. Use F and D
to change channels.

+++ glgrab (GLX only)

A very similar program uses OpenGL as output driver and maps the live
image as a texture on a polygon - try "glgrab" for nicely scaled,
full-screen output ... not always at full frame rates ;-). Works fine with
my Matrox G400 and Geforce2MX cards and the GLX drivers.

+++ asciigrab

Also included is a demo "asciigrab" that converts video in realtime into
ASCII CHARACTERS - just start it in a large enough terminal ... .
See source code for additional usage notes. This program has actually been
exhibited in the "net_condition" art exhibition at the ZKM, Karlsruhe,
Germany on a big projection screen http://www.zkm.de).

+++ delaygrab

A nice example of using MUCH memory, try "delaygrab" in which a few
seconds of video is beeing stored and shown according to a delay-map. If it
runs, try pressing the keys 1, 2 and 3 to switch effects. This effect will
be used in upcoming exhibitions at the ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany with
temperature sensors. A similar program with a network interface was
developed for the world exhibition Expo2000, Hannover 2000 and can be found
in the "expograb" directory.

+++ zoomgrab (3Dfx Glide only)

Also included is a demo "zoomgrab" that shows a live video image at any
scale using a 3dfx graphics card (required). The numbers in "zoomdef.txt"
define zoom scales in ONE SECOND intervals (range: 0.01 to 200.0, first
number in line) and mixer volume settings (range: 0 to 100, second number
in line) that will be smoothly applied to the image and the volume. See
source code for additional usage notes. This program was also part of an art
exhibition at Weimar, Germany in 1999.

+++ artcam (3Dfx Glide only)

A similar demo called "artcam" also uses glide for display. This demo
changes the colors of an image in realtime using a precalculated
conversion table.

+++ webcam

And then there is the really complete and useful "webcam" application - see
the README in the /webcam directory for more explanation and usage
information of this nice little utility.

+++ greydetect

A utility program called "greydetect" makes measurements of the mean
greyscale values in rectangular areas. It can be used for scientific
measurements. See the README in the /greydetect subdirectory for more info
and usage information.

+++ difftrigger

The tool program "difftrigger" can be used as a security or interface
application to detect changes in images (i.e. from moving objects).
See the README in the /difftrigger subdirectory for more info and usage
information. Very similar is the application "tracker". Here the
difference images can be used to track the motion within a rectangular
area and send it to an external program via TCP/IP.

+++ rgbmix

Yet another art-program is the demo "rgbmix". It uses three framegrabber
inputs to get b/w images and mixes them together into a single RGB color
output image. This might make it into the lobby of a big company someday.
Any buyers ... :-)

+++ tracker

Yet another specialized tracking program is "tracker". Again this a program
that was developed for an installation and requires several other utilities
to be useful (asciireflector and reflector2midi). See the local README for
information on this tool. If you want to see it in action, check the passage
from the Frankfurt Airport Terminal to the Trainstation June-December 2000.
Diagrams of the installation and documentation are included in the /tracker
directory.

+++ rtjpegrecord
+++ rtjpegplay

A new addition to libbgrab for capturing live video is RTjpeg. This library
works only on MMX capable CPUs and provides fast motion Jpeg compression
routines. The resulting format is NOT compatible with standard MPEG or JPEG
files - i.e. one needs the RTjpeg library to decompress the generated stream.
The sample applications for recording and playback can be found in the /examples
directory. Since the input video format is YUV420 and a color conversion
would be required for standard RGB X-windows screens, no output will be shown
during the recording phase. To record use "rtjpegrecord" - experiment with the
quality settings for best results. The default setting achieves a 12:1 compression
ration at excellent image quality. To view use "rtjpegplay" on 16bit bpp screens.

CMS RSS Grabber is a system that grabs RSS feeds and fills the content of a CMS system. In other words, CMS content syndication through RSS
It is built in such a flexible way that it doesnt matter which CMS system it connects to. Settings inside the script let you define how you access the database.
Enhancements:
- An option to strip the http:// from the URL that is being exported to CMS.
- Usage is [$url=nohttp$].
- A CMS authors query is added to CMS Settings.
- Selection of author that adds content can be inserted with the [$authorid$] variable.
- Misc. variables for dates and time are added.
- An installation script is added for easy install.
- Settings for WordPress CMS are added.
- The ImportCMS() function didnt include the prefix to the feeddata table, imports to Joomla gave double texts in articles and the URLs had double http:// in them, and CMS update error messages were shown before logging into the system.
- These issues have been fixed.

SDL convertion of libbgrab (a framegrabber lib from the same author).

The library uses a separate thread to grab images into a "triple buffer" queue independent of an external "game loop". This uses memory bandwidth but makes it easy to integrate live video into other applications. Images are always grabbed at 32bit RGBx resolutions.

YUV grabbing is currently not implemented. To improve image quality, several deinterlace
algorithms are available.

Installation:

./autogen.sh (optional)
./configure (./configure --help for options)
make
make install
ldconfig
make distclean

Logscan provides a tool to generate emails in response to security probes or attacks.

Logscan is a tool to assist in generating complaint emails in response to security probes or attacks. Logscan scans through logs looking for patterns and if certain thresh-holds are reached it sends a template email to the local administrators for approval. If the administrator sees the attack is not a mistake they can forward the email to the ISP who owns the attacking IPs.

Logscan has the beginings of an interesting module/library called "whois" which is loosely based on work by Scott Hassan.

This module traverses the tree of various whois servers untill it finds the whois record for the ISP that owns the offending IP and then grabbing the emails of admins responsible there.

As this module evolves it will grab other pieces of information from the whois record (unfortunately there appears to be a variety of formats for whois records).

Morphix project is a derivative of Knoppix, another live CD distribution. Morphix is modular; this means that it consists of a number of parts which together form a working distribution. What does this mean to a normal user?

Well, thats the good part: it doesnt even know about the modules. They are invisible to it, save the startup-output on the console. So, if you dont care about how it works, just grab one of the combined ISOs and boot it!

There are different pre-made cd images with a whole range of (currently GUI-centered) software. It has an easy-to-use installer, if you wish to install it to your harddisk, but it doesnt need to be installed. It doesnt touch the rest of your system without specifically asking you.

Guichan project is a portable C++ GUI library designed for games using Allegro, SDL and/or OpenGL.
Guichan has a very abstract design which allows users of Guichan to use different objects for displaying of graphics and grabbing of user input. Guichan comes with (for now) 3 implemented graphics objects (SDLGraphics, OpenGLGraphics and AllegroGraphics) and 2 implemented input objects (SDLInput and AllegroInput).
Guichan is designed for games. This means that Guichan lacks many features of more advanced GUI libraries (such as GTK, QT). However, this should not be considered a weakness of Guichan but on the contrary a strength of Guichan. When making games you normally dont need all features in advanced GUI libraries. They often complicate things and adding a dependency such as QT for a small platform game doesnt really feel good. Guichan is small but contains all basic GUI features making it ideal for games.
Guichan is designed for games. This means that Guichan will not take over your game/application when it comes to initialization of external libraries. When making games you normally want to initiallize all extern libraries yourself. This gives all users of Guichan a freedom thats almost required in game development. Guichan should not be considered a full GUI library but rather a tool or helper library for game development.
Guichan is designed for games. This means that Guichan comes with a small number of really ugly default widgets. Also, there exists no themes or theme handling for Guichan. Every user of Guichan is suppose to make new widgets by ineherit from the standard widgets or by overloading standard widgets functions. This is very powerful and beats all theme based GUIs. If we would implement theme handling, for widgets to be able to look exaclty as you want, it would have to be very complex and it would increase the size of Guichan. We believe that theme handling for a specific GUI is nothing a game developer wants to learn when developing a simple game. The knowledge of standard C++ ought every game developer possess that uses Guichan, so no new learning is required (except the API) for using Guichan.
Guichan is designed in a very abstract way making it very easy to extend Guichan for your own needs. It is even very easy to implement new graphics objects making Guichan as portable as ANSI C++ is.
Guichan comes under the BSD license and there exist a very good reason for the choice of BSD over LGPL (which i believe are the standard licenses for open(free) source library projects). BSD lets you link with Guichan statically or even include all of the source for Guichan into your own project not using any linkage at all (which would violate the LGPL license). We believe this is something users of Guichan might want to do because of our philosophy of using inheritance and function overloading over theme handling.
Main features:
- Doesnt take over your application when it comes to initialization of external libraries.
- Clean modular objectoriented design.
- Graphics support for SDL, Allegro and OpenGL.
- Input support for SDL and Allegro.
- No themes! As with Javas swing, member functions overloading and inheritance is the way to go.
- Comes with a set of standard widgets.
- No threading! The user of Guichan always has the power to tell Guichan when it can perfom logic and when it can draw itself.
- Licensed under the BSD license and therefore static linkage with Guichan is allowed.
- Very small compared to other GUI libraries like Qt or GTK.