Hi: I trust that I am asking this in the correct newsgroup - apologies if not. I'm using a pcHDTV HD5500 HDTV video card, with an analog cable TV input to record, using mencoder. The command line is embedded in a shell script, below, and is simply invoked with a run (duration) time and a channel number. Occasionaly, perhaps 1 in 10 times, or perhaps worse, I get a stream of error messages, below, and a video file that is bad, jumpy images, possibly field reversed, although I wouldn't recognise that if it bit me. I would appreciate advise as to what could be causing this and what could be done about it. Thank you ERROR Message: Invalid frame duration value (5039.772/5039.562 => -0.210). Defaulting to 0.053 sec. COMMAND Line: Command line from the shell script, where S2 is the channel# and $1 is the running time

mencoder tv:// \ -tv driver=v4l2:chanlist=us-cable:norm=NTSC-M:device=/dev/video0:input=0:quality=0:width=640:height=480:brightness=20:saturation=20:adevice=hw.0:alsa:channel= $2 \ -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=2000:vratetol=32000:mbd=2 \ -oac mp3lame -lameopts fast \ -vf crop=636:476:2:2,denoise3d=4:3:6,harddup \ -noskip -noencodedups -skiplimit 0 -endpos $1 \ -of avi -ofps 30000/1001 -o test.avi

SUCCESSFUL output for a (very) short run

MEncoder 1.0rc2-SUSE Linux 10.3 (x86_64)-Packman-4.2.1 (C) 2000-2007 MPlayer Team CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU 6420 @ 2.13GHz (Family: 6, Model: 15, Stepping: 6) CPUflags: Type: 6 MMX: 1 MMX2: 1 3DNow: 0 3DNow2: 0 SSE: 1 SSE2: 1 Compiled for x86 CPU with extensions: MMX MMX2 3DNow 3DNowEx SSE SSE2

success: format: 9 data: 0x0 - 0x0 TV file format detected. Selected driver: v4l2 name: Video 4 Linux 2 input author: Martin Olschewski <olschewski@zpr.uni-koeln.de> comment: first try, more to come ;-) Selected device: pcHDTV HD5500 HDTV Tuner cap: Tuner rxs: Capabilites: video capture VBI capture device tuner read/write streaming supported norms: 0 = PAL-BG; 1 = PAL-DK; 2 = PAL-I; 3 = PAL-M; 4 = PAL-N; 5 = PAL-Nc; 6 = PAL-60; 7 = NTSC-M; 8 = NTSC-M-JP; 9 = NTSC-443; 10 = SECAM-DK; 11 = SECAM-L; inputs: 0 = Television; 1 = Composite1; 2 = S-Video; Current input: 0 Current format: BGR24 v4l2: current audio mode is : MONO v4l2: ioctl set format failed: Invalid argument v4l2: ioctl set format failed: Invalid argument Selected channel: 3 (freq: 61.250) Channel count not available - reverting to default: 2 Channel count not available - reverting to default: 2 [V] filefmt:9 fourcc:0x59565955 size:640x480 fps:29.97 ftime:=0.0334 ========================================================================== Opening audio decoder: [pcm] Uncompressed PCM audio decoder AUDIO: 44100 Hz, 2 ch, s16le, 1411.2 kbit/100.00% (ratio: 176400->176400) Selected audio codec: [pcm] afm: pcm (Uncompressed PCM) ========================================================================== Opening video filter: [expand osd=1] Expand: -1 x -1, -1 ; -1, osd: 1, aspect: 0.000000, round: 1 Opening video filter: [harddup] Opening video filter: [denoise3d=4:3:6] Opening video filter: [crop w=636 h=476 x=2 y=2] Crop: 636 x 476, 2 ; 2 ========================================================================== Opening video decoder: [raw] RAW Uncompressed Video VDec: vo config request - 640 x 480 (preferred colorspace: Packed UYVY) Could not find matching colorspace - retrying with -vf scale... Opening video filter: [scale] VDec: using Packed UYVY as output csp (no 0) Movie-Aspect is undefined - no prescaling applied. SwScaler: reducing / aligning filtersize 1 -> 4 SwScaler: reducing / aligning filtersize 1 -> 4 SwScaler: reducing / aligning filtersize 1 -> 1 SwScaler: reducing / aligning filtersize 9 -> 8 [swscaler @ 0xd323f0]SwScaler: BICUBIC scaler, from uyvy422 to yuv420p using MMX2 [swscaler @ 0xd323f0]SwScaler: using 4-tap MMX scaler for horizontal luminance scaling [swscaler @ 0xd323f0]SwScaler: using 4-tap MMX scaler for horizontal chrominance scaling [swscaler @ 0xd323f0] SwScaler: using 1-tap MMX "scaler" for vertical scaling (YV12 like) [swscaler @ 0xd323f0]SwScaler: 640x480 -> 640x480 videocodec: libavcodec (636x476 fourcc=34504d46 [FMP4]) [VE_LAVC] High quality encoding selected (non-realtime)! Selected video codec: [rawuyvy] vfm: raw (RAW UYVY) ========================================================================== MP3 audio selected. Forcing audio preload to 0, max pts correction to 0. Writing header...1f ( 0%) 0.00fps Trem: 0min 0mb A-V:0.000 [0:0] ODML: Aspect information not (yet?) available or unspecified, not writing vprp header. Writing header... ODML: Aspect information not (yet?) available or unspecified, not writing vprp header. Pos: 5.0s 150f ( 0%) 28.71fps Trem: 0min 0mb A-V:0.000 [2530:174] Flushing video frames. Writing index... Writing header... ODML: Aspect information not (yet?) available or unspecified, not writing vprp header.

Video stream: 2530.538 kbit/s (316317 B/s) size: 1583168 bytes 5.005 secs 150 frames

Audio stream: 174.123 kbit/s (21765 B/s) size: 108596 bytes 4.989 secs v4l2: 157 frames successfully processed, 0 frames dropped.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------- Roger Pryor Email: rpryor@infoserve.net Vancouver, Canada