Hi Dave, sure thing I can help! I'm sorry for the lengthy struggle, thats not good :(. I think you may just need to install a missing package...

First I should mention that pylongstreamer doesn't function like gst-launch. It's a standalone program which shows how to build pipelines in c/c++, whereas gst-launch is designed to build pipelines from the shell. So pylongstreamer will ignore the "!" and the "queue leaky=1" arguments. Of course though, you could add the queue element inside the code (see the pipelinehelper class for some examples).

In any case, I see the problem is that no h264 encoder plugin for gstreamer could be found on the RPi (at least not any that I know to look for as you can see from the attempts at using different ones...). This feels a little odd because the RPi should have the omxh264enc encoder and work quite well with it.

Have you tried installing the packages below? (with sudo apt-get update, then sudo apt-get install <package>)

gstreamer1.0
gstreamer1.0-dev
gstreamer1.0-libav
gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad
libgstreamer-plugins-base1.0-dev

PS:
pylongstreamer uses the InstantCameraAppSrc class, which creates a source element for a pipeline from the camera, pylon drivers, and gstreamer's AppSrc api. Usually gstreamer intends for AppSrc to be used only in full programs and not for building a standalone gstreamer 'plugin' like what you would use with gst-launch. This is why it's not possible to do something like gst-launch ! InstantCameraAppSrc ! fakesink. (gst-launch is handy, but is really only intended by the gstreamer team for quick testing of pipelines.)

Hi Matt:

Thanks for the speedy reply.  Okay, I did as you suggested above and installed all the packages.  I re-ran the code and I still get the same problem.  Should I recompile as well?

This is what I plugged into the command line and the following response...

pi@raspberrypi:~/Downloads/Junk/pylon_gstreamer-0.2-beta/source $ ./pylongstreamer -aoi 640 480 -framerate 15 -h264file mymovie.h264 100
Press CTRL+C at any time to quit.
Initializing camera and driver...
Using Camera             : Basler daA2500-14um (22386872)
Camera Area Of Interest  : 640x480
Camera Speed             : 14.9999 fps
Creating Pipeline for saving images as h264 video on local host: mymovie.h264...
Could not make omxh264enc encoder. Trying imxvpuenc_h264...
Could not make imxvpuenc_h264 encoder. Trying x264enc...
Could not make x264enc encoder.
An exception occurred in main(): 
Pipeline building failed!

Press Enter to exit.
 

Okay, I'm wondering if a small change I made to your code may be causing the problem.  I couldn't get it to compile because it said in CInstantCameraAppSrc.cpp that GSTMemoryFlags was not declared so I commented it out (yeah, I know... but it didn't look like it was being used).  I could try and reproduce the error, if it helps.

line 288 to 297 states..

// create a gst buffer wrapping the image container's buffer
/*
        m_gstBuffer = gst_buffer_new_wrapped_full(
            (GstMemoryFlags*)GST_MEMORY_FLAG_PHYSICALLY_CONTIGUOUS,
            (gpointer)m_Image.GetBuffer(),
            m_Image.GetImageSize(),
            0,
            m_Image.GetImageSize(),
            NULL,
            NULL);

*/

Yeah, probably dumb but I was frustrated :)  I had a hell of a time finding files as the Makefile couldn't find a bunch of stuff.  Sorry, I am a bit new to compiling c++ code.  I have some experience with C++ but probably not enough!

Again, any help would be greatly appreciated.

Dave :)

No problem Dave, we've all been there ;-)

Yes I would recompile so that it links with the new libraries. I think what happened was that you had gstreamer 0.1 vs gstreamer 1.0 installed. (0.1 has been around forever, and although 1.0 has been out for a few years, there's still a lot of systems that ship with the old version. At least that's what I've heard).

I think that's also what happened with the memory flag. I wonder if this wasn't introduced until 1.0.

PS: A lot of times I can't even make heads or tails of what's in a makefile. I think to some extent they're a mystery to us all ;)

Hi Matt:

Thanks, I feel like a dunderhead sometimes.  I actually via trial and error compiled from the command line adding missing directories along the way.

Okay, I updated all the the libraries and started from a fresh copy (ie: no edits by me)

OMG!  The make file ran flawlessly from a clean copy of your code!!!

Sadly, when I ran pylongstreamer, I got this...

pi@raspberrypi:~/Desktop/pylongst/pylon_gstreamer/source $ ./pylongstreamer -aoi 640 480 -framerate 15 -rescale 320 240 -h264file mymovie.h264 100
Press CTRL+C at any time to quit.
Initializing camera and driver...
Using Camera             : Basler daA2500-14um (22386872)
Camera Area Of Interest  : 640x480
Camera Speed             : 14.9999 fps
Images will be scaled to : 320x240
Creating Pipeline for saving images as h264 video on local host: mymovie.h264...

(pylongstreamer:4206): GLib-GObject-WARNING **: g_object_set_valist: object class 'GstBin' has no property named 'num-buffers'
Source will output 100 frames before sending EOS...
Pipeline Made.
Starting Camera image acquistion and Pylon driver Grab Engine...
Starting pipeline...
**
ERROR:gstomxvideoenc.c:1075:gst_omx_video_enc_set_format: code should not be reached
Aborted

Sooo close!...  I tried to see if I was missing anything for GLIB...  arghh! :)  Any suggestions???  ...sorry to keep bugging you but I need this for an experiment.  We are putting a camera in a centrifuge and then sending the data out via wifi.

Dave :)

Blech. Bug. This one's on me. I must've forgotten to test the h264file pipeline mode before my last commit.

I just pushed a commit with what I hope is a fix (at least it works ok on my side). Fingers crossed!

https://github.com/MattsProjects/pylon_gstreamer

Thanks!  I'll check it out over the weekend! 

Cheers and thanks for all the help!!!