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Re: Qs re: capture card, composite input, devices



On 05/19/2015 02:52 AM, Howard Eisenberger wrote:
On 2015-05-18, Kent West <westk@acu.edu> wrote:

On Mon, May 18, 2015 at 6:56 AM, Howard Eisenberger wrote:

On 2015-05-15, Kent West wrote:

I currently have an RCA-style cable (yellow-tip) going from the VCR's
composite video output to the "Comp In" (yellow) input on the interface
that also has the coax connectors. I also have a stereo RCA cable (red &
yellow tips) going from the VCR's audio outputs to the red & white RCA
jacks on the same interface card.
I have an old PVR-150. Only ivtv0 in dmesg.

[   11.271797] ivtv0: Loaded v4l-cx2341x-enc.fw firmware (376836 bytes)
[   11.468147] ivtv0: Encoder revision: 0x02060039

This is how I use it.

$ v4l2-ctl -i 2 ; sleep 2 ; ivtv-tune -tus-bcast -c3
Video input set to 2 (Composite 1: ok)
/dev/video0: 61.250 MHz

v4l2-ctl is in package v4l-utils

ivtv-tune is in package ivtv-utils

$ cat /dev/video0 | mplayer -cache 8192 -
to watch.

$ cat /dev/video0 > temp.mpg
to save.
Thanks for the reply, Howard. You've gotten me farther along than I've been.

Now I get a screen with a bottom 2/3rds blue background with a jagged top
edge. Ten or so seconds after I turn on my video source, the top third
fills with what kind of looks like large-blocky yellow lines of raster
painting (lines which angle slightly downward).

Might I ask what the commands you've provided do?
I found these instructions when I searched a few years ago, and
they've worked for me ever since. I'm certainly no expert.

In the file I saved with the instructions, I have this link,

http://blog.grantgoodyear.org/2010/09/using-mythtv-to-record-from-vcr.html

I see that it is still online and explains more than I can.

Hopefully this will help.

Howard E.

Okay, from that I get that my guesses were correct.

For some reason, there are two sets of utilities for controlling the capture card (ivtv & v4l2); I'm thinking there's some overlap between the two sets of utils; I have no idea why the separation.

I finally opened up the box; there aren't actually two cards; there's only one (with two tuners; picture-in-picture; record two shows at once; etc), but with two brackets; the second bracket plugs into the card, providing the extra sets of inputs. I read on https://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Hauppauge_PVR-500 that the coax signal is split internally to the two tuners, so there's no need for more than one coax input. Makes sense. (It also mentioned that the PVR-500 is essentially just two PVR-150s on one board.)

More digging on the web provided the info that ten years ago some folks were having trouble getting Tuner 1 to work whilst Tuner 2 worked fine. The above-mentioned site pointed out that the /dev/video0 device is for Tuner 1, and /dev/video1 is for Tuner 2. So I tried:

v4l2-ctl -d /dev/video1 --set-input=4 (I had moved my composite video cable to the second RCA-video In jack)
cat /dev/video1 | mplayer -cache 8192 -

And lo and behold! I have a picture! W00t!

There's a horrible delay (about 8 seconds between movement in front of the video camera and action on the screen), and I haven't even begun tinkering with audio yet, and I have no idea why Tuner 2 works while Tuner 1 does not, but I'm making progress, and I'm learning. Still, for the year 2015?, this is too hard.

Thanks for the help! It's appreciated!

/Kent






--
Kent West     <*)))><
http://kentwest.blogspot.com
Praise Yah! \o/


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