Sample footage

The capture_20180923 companion package: three two-hour recordings of a real landing hill, one per camera. Optional, but the only way to exercise the whole pipeline — motion detection, triggering, merging, encoding, measurement — with no cameras attached.

• What it is and why you would want it
• Specifications
• Package contents
• Downloading
• Installing
• Verifying
• Using it with VDM
• Problems

What it is and why you would want it

Three synchronised recordings from a capture session on 23 September 2018, one from each of the three hill cameras, each two hours long. They are reference input for the application, not output from it — the practice player reads them back into the feed shared memory exactly as if three live cameras were delivering frames, and everything downstream behaves normally.

That makes them useful for:

• Proving a fresh install works end to end before you are standing at a venue with three cameras and a deadline.
• Tuning motion thresholds against known footage, where you can re-run the same jumpers repeatedly and compare results.
• Rehearsing the operator workflow — triggering, measuring, recording distances — without a hill.
• Reproducing a bug on input a developer also has.

Specifications

All three files are identical in format and differ only in camera position and byte size. Every value below was read from the containers directly.

File sizes

The naming convention is capture_<YYYYMMDD>_<cameraIndex>_<frameCount>.mp4, so the date, the feed index and the length are all readable from the filename.

Package contents

The package is distributed as loose files — no zip, no split archive. Download all six into a single folder.

Downloading

The footage is published alongside the software installer at thehansens.com/tournament/vdm/install/. Download all six files into one folder, using either a browser or the command line.

curl.exe -O -C - https://thehansens.com/tournament/vdm/install/capture_20180923_0_432000.mp4
curl.exe -O -C - https://thehansens.com/tournament/vdm/install/capture_20180923_1_432000.mp4
curl.exe -O -C - https://thehansens.com/tournament/vdm/install/capture_20180923_2_432000.mp4
curl.exe -O https://thehansens.com/tournament/vdm/install/SHA256SUMS.txt
curl.exe -O https://thehansens.com/tournament/vdm/install/manifest.json
curl.exe -O https://thehansens.com/tournament/vdm/install/Install-SampleFootage.ps1

Always verify after downloading. A truncated 2 GB file is not obviously truncated — it opens, plays, and simply ends early. See Verifying.

Installing

From the folder containing the downloaded files:

powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File .\Install-SampleFootage.ps1 -SourcePath .

Verifying

The simplest check, which also confirms the files landed where they should:

powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File .\Install-SampleFootage.ps1 -VerifyOnly -DestinationPath C:\VDM\CapturedVideos

To verify by hand with the standard tools instead:

sha256sum -c SHA256SUMS.txt

on Linux or macOS (or shasum -a 256 -c SHA256SUMS.txt), or for a single file on Windows:

Get-FileHash capture_20180923_0_432000.mp4 -Algorithm SHA256

A quick sanity check that does not require hashing 6 GB: compare the byte sizes against the table above. A partial download will nearly always show a different size.

Using it with VDM

The footage is played into the pipeline by practice_player.exe, which reads the files and writes frames into the feed shared memory at 60 fps — from everything downstream's point of view, indistinguishable from live cameras.

1. Launch VDM.exe.
2. Open Tools → Select Practice Files… and browse to the three installed .mp4 files, assigning each to its matching feed — _0_ to feed 0, _1_ to feed 1, _2_ to feed 2. This writes *practice_video_path[0..2].
3. Preview tab → Launch Practice. Four processes spawn: practice_player.exe plus three motion.exe.
4. Watch the title bar. The cap and m counters should climb, and movies commit automatically as jumpers are detected.
5. Stop All to finish — twice, since the first click in practice mode deliberately leaves the motion processes running.

Full workflow detail is in User guide § practice mode.

What to expect

Each file is a full two hours, so a run through the whole thing is a long session. For a quick install check you do not need to watch it out: confirm that frames flow, that motion fires, that a clip is committed to the archive directory, and that it opens in the viewer with grid lines drawn.

Bear in mind that grid-line calibration in your settings.txt is tied to a specific camera rig. Distances measured against this 2018 footage will only be meaningful if the calibration in your configuration corresponds to the rig that recorded it. For an install check what matters is that the pipeline runs, not that the numbers are correct.

Problems