[Mplayer-dvb] Hauppage Nova display and record

[Stephen Davies]

On Mon, 11 Mar 2002, Benoit Jacquemont wrote:

> I read that is possible to make the stream from the card flow to MPlayer for 
> decoding and display. First of all, I would lilke to know if it's true and if 
> it works really fine.

I use a Nova DVB-T card in my box.  It works well.

Watching live is a matter of grabbing the right pids, converting to PS or
PES MPEG stream and feeding to mplayer.  This can be done in a simple
pipeline.  I use dvbstream to get thepids, ts2ps to get a program stream.

In practice, though, I almost never watch DVB live.  I generally capture
and playback later.  Or, perhaps, capture and watch the recording as it is
made (pause-live-tv).

> The second thing : what I would like to do with this card is to record in 
> DivX ;-) format the live stream. Is it possible to make MPlayer act as a kind 
> of filter/converter between the live MPEG2-encoded stream from the card and 
> the hard drive as a DivX file ? I think it means a powerful computer ( and 
> maybe mine is not enough (Pentium III 500 Mhz), but I would like to know if 
> it is possible and usable.

Well - I capture the DVB MPEG2 stream "as is" to disk
(dvbstream -o | ts2ps >output.mpg).  I sometimes convert the resulting
file to divx afterwards with mencoder.

I haven't tried real-time conversion to divx - suspect to do that with
mencoder would need a pretty strong CPU.  For me I often capture multiple
streams at once so wouldn't want to waste the CPU.

I'll test that out for you. though.

Regards,
STeve