Running the H.264 Demo using GUI

The demo captures live stream from a camera on a PolarFire SoC Video kit and performs H.264 compression using the FPGA fabric logic. A webserver application, running on the MSS, allows user to connect to the PolarFire SoC Video kit through Ethernet. To view the webserver, enter the IP address of the kit in a web browser. The webpage on the browser allows you to control streaming of the live video from the Video kit to the connected system. After the stream is initiated on the webpage, the application running on the MSS reads a compressed stream of data from the fabric and sends the encoded H.264 RTP Ethernet packets to the IP address of the system which initiated the stream. To play the video stream on a computer, use applications such as VLC Media Player, Gstreamer, or FFPlay. The webpage allows you to download an SDP file that can be passed on to the video player after the streaming is initiated.

To run the H.264 demo using GUI, perform the following steps:

Insert the dual-camera sensor module in J10 on the PolarFire SoC Video kit. Ensure to remove the camera lens cap.
Note: Do not connect any Ethernet cable from the host to the Video kit.
On the windows host, open command prompt in Admin mode and type ipconfig.
Figure . Executing the ipconfig Command

Note down the name of the Ethernet adapter displayed against the Media disconnected interface. It is Ethernet in this case
Power on the kit, connect an an Ethernet cable from Video kit eth0 port to the PC Ethernet port. There are two Ethernet ports on the Video kit. The Ethernet port eth0 is next to the camera mount.
Figure . etho Port
Connect the HDMI cable between J14 and Monitor to view the video.
Login to Linux. (username is “root”, password is not required).
On the Video kit Linux COM port, type ifconfig. It must report some IP, which indicates that the Ethernet port is working, see the following figure.
Figure . Fetching the Ethernet Port Status
Set the host IP address to 192.168.2.X, where X is any integer from 2 to 255 and the Subnet mask to 255.255.255.0 using the following command. This is a one-time process and need not be done every time the Video kit is connected.
```
netsh interface ip set address "Ethernet" static 192.168.2.100 255.255.255.0
```
Figure . Setting the Host IP Address
Check if the connection is successful by pinging the Video kit, see the following figure.
Figure . Pining the SEV Kit
Connect the RJ45 Ethernet cable between any one of the Ethernet ports (connector J6 or J7) of the board and the host PC.
Default IP address of the board are 192.168.2.1 (J6) and 192.168.2.2 (J7) based on the interface (depends on the GEM port user is connected to). Ensure that the host PC is in the same network.
Power ON the board and wait for the system boot sequence to complete. The LED highlighted (LED 3) in the following figure glows green once the Linux boot up sequence is completed. Restart the board if LED 3 does not glow.
Figure . PolarFire® SoC Video Kit—LED Indication
From the host PC, open the web browser. Enter the IP address of the PolarFire SoC Video Kit, depending on the Gigabit Ethernet MAC (GEM) you are connected to (J6: 192.168.2.1 or J7: 192.168.2.2), in the address bar and press Enter. The H.264 demonstration GUI loads in the browser, see the following figure.
Figure . H.264 GUI
Click the Start Video to initiate the video streaming. The GUI creates a Session Description Protocol (SDP) file. VLC player uses this to accept streaming packets from the Ethernet cable.
- Click Download SDP file to download the SDP file.
- Windows: Open the SDP file with the VLC player to play the video stream.
- Linux: Open the SDP file with the VLC player or execute the vlc command in the terminal, with the SDP file as argument, for example, vlc video.sdp.
Observe a live stream video captured from one of the cameras in the PolarFire SoC Video Kit. This is a scaled and H.264 compressed video of 1280 x 720 resolution. To change the resolution, select the resolution as shown in the following figure and click Update.
Figure . Select Resolution
Observe the live stream video in the VLC player, as shown in the following figure.
Figure . Live Stream Video

This concludes the demo.
To get back from static to DHCP (dynamic), execute the following command in the Windows CMD:
```
netsh interface ip set address name="Ethernet" dhcp
```

Note: The demo is created with the evaluation version of H.264 I-frame encoder IP that expires after one hour, hence your video stops streaming after one hour.