[MEncoder-users] Recording TV with WinTV bt878

[Barton Bosch]

Guennadi Liakhovetski wrote:
> Hi
> 
> On Thu, 2 Dec 2004, Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski wrote:
> 
> 
>>On Thursday, 02 December 2004 at 22:02, Barton Bosch wrote:
>>
>>>FC2 installation.  However, as I later read in the FAQ, mencoder 
>>>does not record any audio signal.
>>
>>Fortunately, that FAQ entry is outdated and no longer correct.
>>
>>
>>>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?
>>
>>Actually, both ways work. That is, recording from line-in and from
>>btaudio, though I haven't tried it for some time now.
> 
> 
> I now seem to have the same problem - cannot record audio. My TV-card 
> (Hauppage WinTV Express bt878) was in another PC, and there I was able to 
> record audio with mencoder. Now I switched the card to another (faster) 
> PC, and, although I hear the sound, it is not recrded. Neither with 
> mencoder, nor with avicap. The difference - in the first PC I hava an ISA 
> sound-card (snd-es18xx), in this one - PCI (snd-via82xx). I did unmute 
> IGain on the card, used the same (and other) mencoder options as on the 
> first PC - no success. Any idea what that could be?
> 
> Barton, did you manage to get sound working? If yes - how?

Uh, yeah.  I thought I knew all the alsamixer gotchas after going 
through the unmuting thing last year, heh.

Haven't done any recording through external lines til now though. 
After two days of trial and error I saw the LcapturR indicator that 
needs to be over linein rather than mic to get signal from the TV 
card's external cable...

The effort wasn't a total wash because I did stumble on some other 
useful info.  Which bttv options are you all using?  What is pll? 
According to modinfo bttv it has something to do with a crystal 
(tuner?).  Do I need to throw it?  What about fieldnr?  Is that 
obsolete now?  Does the number of gbuffers have any impact on CPU usage?

I'd really appreciate some tips towards minimizing CPU usage when 
capturing TV.  So far, any time I record through the lacv mpeg4 
option I max the CPU and start dropping mass frames.  Is there a 
format which is smaller than raw video but less computationally 
intense than mpeg4 but with comparable quality?


TIA,

Barton