[MPlayer-users] mencoder TV Capture - video buffer full

[rcooley]

David Frey wrote:
> CPU shouldn't be a problem.
You might be surprised ;-).

>  This line here leads me to believe that there
> is no encoding going on:
> Writing AVI header...
> Pos:   0.0s      1f ( 0%)   0fps Trem:   0min   0mb  A-V:0.000 [0:0]
> 
Of course, you are right, it doesn't look like a CPU problem upon closer 
inspection.

> The error saying that the buffer is full follows this.  It seems like the
> capture component is working, but the encoding part is stuck on something.
Hmm, I don't quite think so.  I would bet that your problem is your 
btaudio driver.  Whenever I hear btaudio, the hair on the back of my 
neck stands up.  It's one of those extremely hacky and unreliable pieces 
of software that only works for about 3 different cards, and then only 
if you are _lucky_.

I basically ignored that the first time around because you sounded like 
you knew it was working, and there seemed to be much simpler, and more 
likely causes.  However, the fact that the buffer is filling up sounds 
_exactly_ like mencoder is buffering all the video it can, but can't 
encode because it is waiting for audio.

Have you followed the btaudio instructions, and tried capturing audio 
from dsp1 with sox?  If that doesn't work, btaudio isn't working.

First thing I suggest you try, is switching your command frome using 
DSP1, to DSP, to see how well capture works from line-in through the 
loop-back cable.

If mencoder encoding audio from line-in doesn't work, I'm out of 
suggestions, and you should probably file an offical bug report.  If it 
does work, you can either be happy with recording from the loopback 
cable, or you can try again at getting btaudio working.

> My understanding was that the btaudio thing was only for capture, so if I
> unplug the line from my soundcard to tv card, I won't get any audio when

Well, that's true depending on how you want to do things... You could 
just launch 'sox' or something else to redirect audio from dsp1 to dsp. 
  Or you could just use a TV-app like mplayer that is smart enough that 
it can grab audid from a specific device.  Check out the 
"immediatebool=" option if you want to do that.

> viewing.  Having said that, I don't know why the card would be sending
> audio data to it's line out while I was using the onboard capture feature.
>  Any ideas?

The audio out on the TV-card turns on whenever the card is on...  It 
isn't smart enough to know if it should or not.  You should just mute 
your line-in while recording, and unmute it when you want to watch TV 
live.  Personally, I would make a small shell script that automatically 
does that for me; something like this...

tvtime.sh:
   #!/bin/sh
   amixer set Line unmute
   exec tvtime

Obviously, you will need to adjust that for your favorite audio mixer 
and tv-viewer.