[MEncoder-users] Recording TV with WinTV bt878

[Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski]

On Thursday, 02 December 2004 at 23:50, Guennadi Liakhovetski wrote:
> 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.

I've had good results at 512x384 on my Athlon 1GHz with ye olde BT848
(FlyVideo 2000S). The biggest problem was my disk which couldn't keep up
with the bandwidth.

> > 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.

With btaudio you get another dsp (/dev/dsp2).

[...]
> > 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.

Not entirely correct. If all that's missing is just that btaudio driver,
you might get away with compiling just modules after configuring your
kernel sources with exactly the same config as the running kernel and
enabling btaudio. Of course the sources must be the same, too.

R.

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