[MPlayer-users] Re: recording from video tapes (a novice question)

[Stefan Seyfried]

Andre Bruce <abruce at ig.com.br> writes:

>> did you try changing "igain" settings?
> 
> Yes. If i set igan to ZERO, no sound is recorded, but if i set igain to
> the lowest possible(after zero), then it gets distorced.

ok, so we are on the right track, at least we have a signal and
the right signal path ;-)

I don't know exactly where your problem is now. Maybe the signal is
just too loud, and you need to attenuate it with two external resistors
(easy if you know a bit about electronics and on which side the sodering
iron gets hot ;-), the other possibility is, that your input is switched
to microphone or something like that and is thus much too sensitive.

If you are using ALSA, you could try alsamixer or (gui) gamix, which throws
a bunch of controls at me when using it to control the soundcard of my
thinkpad, maybe there is some magic hidden switch which the oss mixers
(kmix, aumix, ...) can't handle. I had a problem that i had a microphone
feedback noise on my thinkpad but no (OSS) mixer could turn it down, only
gamix could. The next thing i did was store the (now quiet :-) setting 
with "alsactl -f quiet.alsactl store" so i can restore it whenever i need.
Of course, this only applies to ALSA.

Maybe, you could try another input (i hooked my TV card to the CD in input,
since i didn't use it anyway and have the line in free for recording from
the composite video input, but this also involves soldering a special cable.
 
> Do you think that this problem is more related to the sound card than to
> the capture card ?!?

yes, definitely, i'm quite sure, it has not much to do with the capture card
now. But wait, if you are recording via the antenna input, maybe you could 
try lowering the volume via the "v4lctl volume" command, i don't know if
this just manipulates the soundcard mixers, or if there are Capture cards
out there which have a volume control built in. I think i'm lucky, i never
had problems like this ;-)

>> check the input level with "record" from the xawtv package and remember
>> that some soundcards begin clipping before they reach the theoretical
>> maximum value of +-32767.
> 
> That was a good ideda, just checked it out!! While recordidg with
> "record" i played with "ïgain" .. And i realized that the minimum igain 
> i can get on KMIX is not enough. I need something bellow that ! 

well, maybe another mixer (aumix is my favorite, or gamix for ALSA) can
do settings more precise, but my perception is, that the soundcards often
have a limited number of steps for those settings, they are not "analogue".

>> Oh, and if you could try not to produce annoying fullquotes... ;-)
>> http://got.to/quote
> 
> Can't read that language :P 

ok, you got me. A better link would be 
http://www.netmeister.org/news/learn2quote.html

>  What is a fullquote ? 

A full qoutation of the previous mail(s). But well, you did it right
this time ;-)

Best regards and good luck

  Stefan
-- 
 Stefan Seyfried, seife at gmane0305.slipkontur.de
+----------------------------------------------+

"If you want to travel around the world and be invited to speak at a lot of
 different places, just write a Unix operating system." -- [Linus Torvalds]
.