Use EffecTV and Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) to create your own real-time visual effects on live video. Learn how to integrate geometric primitives, bitmap image loading, and simple motion tracking to create your own games, leading-edge user interfaces, or immersive environments. Explore the EffecTV and SDL architectures, and learn how to harness the power of open source video processing on Linux®.

Real-time video effects processing is becoming more common throughout major sporting events. NASCAR, the NFL, professional hockey, and other sports apply real-time video effects, such as the colored first-down line in football, based on precise geospatial data. Advanced user interfaces and immersive environments employ specialized input hardware to specify coordinates in a 3-D world with six degrees of freedom. These technologies all require investment in expensive hardware and custom data acquisition packages. You can build your own system for real-time video effects processing based on simple motion tracking and existing open source software.

EffecTV is a fantastic application written by Fukuchi Kentaro that gives you access to the raw pixel data from a video capture device. You can use its existing open source framework to modify more than two dozen effects, or add your own. With the integration of the SDL libraries, the EffecTV framework makes it easy to add your own effects with more abstracted interfaces, making them easier to create and integrate with existing code.

This article will cover the installation and setup of EffecTV, the integration with a geometrical primitives API, and the application of a simple motion-tracking algorithm on a computer running Fedora Core V3. You can use your own distribution of Linux, as the software components are not specific to Fedora distributions. When you complete the installation, you can use these basic concepts and architecture descriptions to build your own immersive environments, games, or next-generation computing interfaces.