[MEncoder-users] Recording TV with WinTV bt878

[Barton Bosch]

Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski wrote:
> 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.

Ah ok, I had wanted to use my backup system for recording tv (PIII 
550, 384 MB PC-100, slower hdds).  On watching the samples I just 
recorded I am noticing some blurring, jerky motion and distortion 
though no pixelation.


>>>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 tried about every option there is and I think that I have narrowed 
the problem down to some mplayer audio/tv card problem.

Regardless of what options I throw I always get sound from the tv 
card if line in is unmuted in alsa mixer.  I also know that sound is 
functioning in mplayer;  I played a prerecorded mpg from the 
internet archive with:

mplayer <filename.mpg>

and audio/video was just fine.

Unless I use the immediatemode=0 with mplayer no audio codec is 
opened and mplayer reports, "no sound".  With immediatemode=0 or 
mencoder mplayer reports that it is recording an audio stream.

However when playing the test recording back I get video only, no audio.

The simplified command that I use for watching tv that opens an 
audio decoder is:

mplayer tv:// -ao sdl -tv driver=v4l2:device=/dev/video0:immediatemode=0


The dmesg output from:   # modprobe bttv card=10 tuner=44, is:

bttv: driver version 0.9.14 loaded
bttv: using 8 buffers with 2080k (520 pages) each for capture
bttv: Host bridge needs ETBF enabled.
bttv: Bt8xx card found (0).
bttv0: Bt878 (rev 17) at 0000:00:0d.0, irq: 11, latency: 132, mmio: 
0xf4009000
bttv0: detected: Hauppauge WinTV [card=10], PCI subsystem ID is 
0070:13eb
bttv0: using: Hauppauge (bt878) [card=10,insmod option]
bttv0: enabling ETBF (430FX/VP3 compatibilty)
bttv0: gpio: en=00000000, out=00000000 in=00ffffdb [init]
bttv0: Hauppauge/Voodoo msp34xx: reset line init [5]
bttv0: Hauppauge eeprom: model=29440, tuner=<NULL> (-1), radio=no
bttv0: using tuner=44
bttv0: i2c: checking for MSP34xx @ 0x80... not found
bttv0: i2c: checking for TDA9875 @ 0xb0... not found
bttv0: i2c: checking for TDA7432 @ 0x8a... not found
tuner: chip found at addr 0xc2 i2c-bus bt878 #0 [sw]
tuner: type set to 44 (Philips 4 in 1 (ATI TV Wonder Pro/Conexant)) 
by bt878 #0 [sw]
bttv0: registered device video0
bttv0: registered device vbi0
bttv0: PLL: 28636363 => 35468950 . ok
bttv0: PLL can sleep, using XTAL (28636363).


So what's up?  Any ideas why I can't get sound from the tv tuner 
through mplayer/encoder?  One caveat is that this model of the WinTV 
does not have stereo sound which I think (but I am not sure) means 
that there isn't a separate chip to handle audio.

> [...]
> 
>>>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.

Well, if I should be able to record audio without the bttv driver 
then I'd just as soon not learn how to properly compile a kernel 
right at the moment.  Hopefully someone can decode the initalization 
output and figure out how to get the tv tuner audio functioning with 
mplayer/encoder.


Thanks for the help,

Barton