[MPlayer-users] tv recording - newbie questions

[Mauro Condarelli]

Hi all,
I "just" want to record some late night tv program in order to be able 
to see it next day.

My hardware is a decent intel D865GBF motherboard with on-board i810 
audio and a (quite old) Hauppage WinTV (bt878-based). Speed shouldn't be 
a problem (2.8G), I have 1G Ram and plenty (>>500Gb) of HD space.
Distribution is Debian Sarge.

I managed to do basic recording using the following:

amixer set Line 90% mute cap
mencoder tv://Rai_1 -tv 
driver=v4l2:device=/dev/video0:norm=PAL:chanlist=italy:alsa:quality=60:width=640:height=480 
-noskip -o /export/ttt/test.avi -oac mp3lame -lameopts cbr:br=64 -ovc 
lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=900 -vf pp=lb
amixer set Line 0% mute nocap

I almost managed to make a fool of myself forgetting the "amixer" lines 
(and thus ending up with no audio!).

I have two questions:
1) I would like to record audio directly from the snd-bt87x device; what 
should I do?
2) What are the best parameters to tecord TV? keep in mind that:
   - I do record rather noisy over-the-air analog TV.
   - I do not care too much for "the best compression" since i do not 
plan to store the shows, just to see    them delayed.
   - I would like to record unattended and I have seen that other PVRs 
offer "commercial removal" how does that work?

Thanks in Advance
Mauro