[MPlayer-users] Re: Which TV card ?

[Erik Slagter]

> Yes. You possibly _meant_ that, but why didn't you _write_ that? ;-)
> Would have been perfect to receive something like: "Use a Terratec XYZ" and
> everything will work fine... Would have saved me a from long tapping in the
> dark.

That's because you didn't hint you were willing and able to change the
card...

> Anyway, now I have a working card, and the image doesn't look such bad. I also
> tried meanwhile to record something to disk with xawtv, but I am very unsafe
> what I do. I get big files for video and audio, but I have no idea what to do
> with them.
> Trying kWinTV gives no result. I get a file named video0.avi, but it cannot be
> played.

My experience is that encoding with mencoder to mjpeg works best.

Try this: 

mencoder -idx -ofps 25 tv:// -tv
driver=v4l:device=/dev/video0:width=720:height=576:fps=25:forceaudio=1:audiorate=48000:amode=1:forcechan=2:adevice=/dev/dsp -vf crop=704:576,denoise3d=8:6:6,pp=md -oac mp3lame -lameopts vbr=0:cbr:br=192:aq=0:mode=1 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mjpeg:vqscale=3

(this is all one long line).

Some options are same as the default, I know.

This will produce an avi file with high quality mjpeg video and
medium/high quality mp3 sound, which should be playable even by window$.

You may have to adjust a few parameters. If you card supports v4l2
(try...) you should try that (driver=v4l2). If you card is mono, set
forcechan to 1 and amode to 0. If you think you files are getting too
large, decrease the vqscale setting (set it to a _higher_ value). This
sometimes also helps if mencoder isn't fast enough.

You may also switch off de-interlacing (remove ,pp=md). If your
reception is really good or you perceive ghost images, decrease the
values for denoise3d or remove it completely. This also helps when your
system is too slow.

This avi is suitable for re-encoding to mpeg2 for dvd or mpeg4 using for
instance ffmpeg or transcode.