[MPlayer-dev-eng] Recording and viewing TV

[Jesse L. Zamora]

Hello everyone,

	Now that I've figured out how to get Mplayer to work well with my program, 
there is one thing left to be done. When recording from a TV tuner device 
using Mencoder, the only way to view what is recording is to play back the 
video in Mplayer.....which doesn't really work too well sometimes. I've tried 
to do it several times, but after 40 seconds of playing back the video Mplayer 
closes saying it reached the end of the file. Another issue is that the video 
lags too far behind (3 or 4 seconds) and I think that is unacceptable.

	I have an idea that may very well work, and I think it shouldn't be to 
difficult to implement in Mplayer. There could be an option for Mplayer which 
would make it copy all the raw video to a pipe while displaying video to the 
window. Basically, it would add a command line to Mplayer like:

 $ mplayer tv:// -wid <window_id> -copy-output /path/to/mkfifo_pipe 

and then you could plug mencoder into the pipe to start recording, and there 
you have it! But, I'm sure there would be issues such as mencoder not 
detecting the stream format and things of that nature....so does anyone have 
any suggestions on this idea? It seems like a far better solution than what 
can be done now...

Thanks,
Xtreme Kommander