[MEncoder-users] Recording TV with WinTV bt878

[Guennadi Liakhovetski]

Hi

Ok, I am no v4l guru at all - just started myself, but I did manage to 
record something (video + audio) with a WinTV bt878 card (Express), so...

On Thu, 2 Dec 2004, Barton Bosch wrote:

> I recently added a Hauppauge WinTV GO-Plus tuner card (model #1033) to my
> system and have been trying to record from it on RH9 and FC2.

It doesn't have a hardware mpeg-encoder either, does it? If it doesn't, do 
you have a ~2GHz CPU and ~512M RAM? If you do, you might be able to record 
with reasonable size and quality... My best results on a dual PII-400MHz 
with 128M RAM was 1/4-VGA 320x240 with more or less suitable quality. 
480x360 is still possible, but the quality already suffers a lot. Anything 
above that (approx) drops frames / produces OOM. I was recording with 
mencoder from a commandline without X running, so, "all" RAM was dedicated 
to mencoder. The best, I guess, was with 3 threads (I couldn't even run 
top - not enough RAM:-))) I might try it later in a somewhat faster PC 
with more RAM.

> So far I have managed to use mplayer to watch tv with audio on my FC2
> installation.  However, as I later read in the FAQ, mencoder does not record
> any audio signal.

It does - for me. I just connected the TV-card with the sound-card. As I 
read somewhere you have to set IGain - and it did help.

> From the other reading that I have done I gather that it is possible to record
> audio and video from the tv card by using the btaudio driver.  Is that
> correct?

Don't know, if that's the btaudio driver is used. Don't think so. The 
audio device is specified as /dev/dsp. So, you just need a driver for your 
sound-card.

> I ask because it appears that I am at an impasse.  The RH 9 kernel has the
> btaudio driver compiled but DAG's recent RPM of mplayer crashes when trying to
> watch tv from my tuner card.  The FC2 installation is capable of watching tv
> and recording the video signal, but it appears that it was compiled without
> the btaudio driver.
> 
> I haven't delved deeply into compiling my own kernels;  it doesn't intimidate
> me but I would prefer to spend my time doing sound, video and graphics if
> possible.  Would it be necessary to compile the entire kernel or can I compile
> just the btaudio module?  Does anyone here have tv recording working with the
> WinTV GO-Plus and RH9/FC2? Are there any other factors that I am missing?

I am using Debian and I did anyway have a self-compiled kernel, so, cannot 
help you here, sorry. But, yes, to compile btaudio you need the complete 
kernel and you have to compile a compatible configuration with the same 
compiler - if you only want to add this module. "Compatible" means, 
critical options, like preemption, SMP / UP, high-mem, processor type must 
match your running kernel - if it's a 2.6.

HTH
Guennadi
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Guennadi Liakhovetski