[MPlayer-users] mencoder vs. saa7134_alsa

[Rumi Szabolcs]

Hello!

On Mon, 6 Nov 2006 16:55:33 +0100
Rumi Szabolcs <rumi_ml at rtfm.hu> wrote:

> I'm trying to get a Terratec Cinergy 250 PCI TV tuner card working
> which is based on the SAA7131E and TDA8275A ICs.
> 
> This card doesn't have an external loop for sound but needs
> the saa7134_alsa module to provide an internal sound grabber
> device under ALSA. I was trying to use that with mplayer-1.0rc1
> and found that somehow it does not detect or set the audio
> bitrate correctly on that device.
> 
> When I try this:
> 
> $ mencoder tv:// -tv driver=v4l2:device=/dev/video0:normid=3:freq=695.250:width=720:height=576:alsa:adevice=hw.0,0:amode=1 \
>         -fps 25 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=2048:autoaspect=1:mbd=2 -oac mp3lame -lameopts cbr:br=128 -o test.avi
> 
> mencoder reported ~17fps while encoding the video and the sound
> in the resulting .avi was a lot higher pitched and faster than
> the original, not in sync with the video which was at normal
> speed. Mencoder reported that the audio sample rate was 48000Hz.

I did some more g00gling and found that this may be a common issue:

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HARDWARE_saa7134#Mplayer_and_Mencoder
http://itdp.fh-biergarten.de/mplayer-dev-eng/2004-01/msg00102.html

Looks like there has been a patch committed back in 2004 but
mencoder from 1.0rc1 still does not seem to detect/work around
this problem. IMHO it's non-trivial for the average user to
find out what's wrong there so I think it would be nice if
mencoder could detect it and adjust the sample rate
automatically or emit some warning. Any comments?

Thanks!

Regards,

Sab