[MEncoder-users] MEncoder and DV ?

[Levente Novák]

I'm forwarding this question and my answer to the list, they might
interest other people as well.

On Mon, 2008-01-28 at 18:28 +0000, Dieter wrote:
> Hello,  I'm wondering if you ever got mencoder to create DV format
> output?  (without core dumping and such)

I used this command line last summer and it worked well (I changed my
bt878-based card to a Hauppauge PVR-150 since then, and do not need to
convert captures to DV anymore, so I'm uncertain if it still works):

mencoder tv:// -tv driver=v4l2:device=/dev/video0:\
input=2:outfmt=uyvy:width=720:height=576:fps=25:\
audiorate=48000:forceaudio:amode=1:forcechan=2:\
brightness=6:contrast=-20 \
-vf phase=t,fil=d:d,scale,format=yv12,fil=i:i,harddup \
-of lavf -sws 0 -lavfopts format=dv -oac pcm -ovc lavc \
-lavcopts vcodec=dvvideo:top=0:ildct -o file.dv

This is for PAL S-video sources. The phase inversion filter was needed
since this card used to capture interlaced frames top-first in contrast
to DV which is bottom-first. The magic with interlaced scaling
circumvents the infamous bt8x8 chroma interlacing bug, without uyvy
captures the image flickers badly around coloured areas. (BTW I do not
understand why the maintainers of bt8x8 refuse to properly fix this
issue known for years.)

Beware that you need a fairly powerful machine to record this way in
real time due to the rescaling. It could attain 25 fps on a 3.06 GHz
Celeron D only with about 90% CPU load, that's why fil was substituted
to il and a simple linear scaling (-sws 0) was used instead of the
default one.

The files this command line produced were perfectly handled by Kino.

Levente