[MPlayer-users] First steps with TV-Card (Was: Which TV card ?)

[Rainer Hantsch]

Hello, Erik,
and thanks a lot for your patience with me.

Meanwhile I see a silverstripe on the horizon, I can do very first tiny
steps and record TV. Ok, quality is currently not as wanted, but I am happy
that it works anyway...... :-)

Before I start:
---------------
I had a look on the used mencoder which I downloaded two days ago, it is:
MEncoder 0.90-RPM-3.2 (C) 2000-2003 Arpad Gereoffy


What currently works:
---------------------
* kWinTV and xawtv are able to show TV on the screen.
* I can move forward and backward between channels and select this way
  a station.
* After that, I can exit the TV program and execute the following script,
  this records the last selected station to a file.

---<snip>--------------------------
#!/bin/sh

# When I insert this line into mencoder's options, mencoder aborts.
# Maybe, there are some parameters unknown by my mencoder version?
# -vop crop=704:576,denoise3d=8:6:6,pp=md \


mencoder -tv \
on:driver=v4l:device=/dev/video0:width=720:height=576:fps=25:forceaudio=1:\
audiorate=48000:amode=1:forcechan=2:adevice=/dev/dsp \
-oac mp3lame -lameopts cbr:br=128 \
-ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mjpeg:vqscale=3 \
-o video1.mpg
---<snap>--------------------------

The resulting 'video1.mpg' includes sound, when I set LINE to active in kmix
before. What I am wondering is that I hear the sound while I an recording from
a shell without any TV-output.

a.) How do I set the recording volume by the script?
    When watching TV, I must set it to a relatively high level (80%) to get
    good sound. For recording, I must set it to 30% to get the same level at
    playback.

b.) Is it possible to also set explicitely Line-In as recording input
    from a shell script, too? I guess yes, but how? (I am absolutely new
    in behalf of multimedia things, as you surely have found out meanwhile.)

c.) Is it possible to record a TV show without hearing the audio?
    Means: mencoder should get its input, but there should be no output,
    so I can hear other system sounds meanwhile. Is this possible, or does
    mencoder record everything which comes out of the speaker?

d.) Color saturation
    After my first tests I could find out that the recorded video has a very
    low color saturation. How can I set it to a higher level, i.e. 20% more?



mfg

  Ing. Rainer Hantsch