[MPlayer-users] Which TV card ?

[Erik Slagter]

> | clean (not distorted or noisy) tv signal, mencoder, 384x288 resolution,
> | lavc msmpeg4 codec with about 1500 kbits/s bitrate, pcm audio
> | I am afraid, PIII-800 is too slow for full resolution.
> 
> Only 1/4 PAL size? =8-(  This is not really useful, because when I blow up
> these few pixels to a 16:9 65cm image on my TV, all I get is a bunch of
> colored pixels, but no movie of good quality... :-/
> 
> Will it help to do it in two steps?
> First to stream the raw-data to a file (or audio/video streamed into two
> separate files, whichever causes less CPU load), and then finally convert
> into a usable standard video format?

Why the msmpeg4???

I use full size capturing with mencoder (and denoise3d/hqdn3d for
reasonable compression) with mjpeg and mp3. Afterwards you can convert
it anything you like, including mpeg4 and mpeg2 (slow!).

> I have absolutely no experience with TV cards, so excuse my possibly stupid
> question:
> When the SAA4137 chip is detected by YAST2 (I am talking about SuSE 8.1/8.2).
> Is everything done hereby, or must a tuner be defined separately? What I am
> wondering about is why I get absolutely nothing displayed in the video frame
> of xawtv and/or kWinTV. It is only black. shouldn't I see at least "snow", or
> is this suppressed?

Seems like the video input is not switched properly. This is the only
thing that differs between different cards. Apparently the default is
not "tuner in" on your card.

Did you start capturing with xawtv?

> Could somebody leave me a brief description on how I can find out if my
> "deluxe" Medion-Card is working at all?

Look at the saa713* (!) homepage. From the top of my head it's
bytesex.org, but you may have to google. Not simply every card is
supported.