So I picked up a PVR-150 for video capture. Of course this is the classic problem of capturing video from a RCA/VHS source. I’ve got two other video capture cards (ATI TV-Wonder PCI and ASUS TV-7135LP). So far, it looks like the input from the PVR-150 is vastly superior to the others. That said, it’s also proven to be vastly more challenging to get input from.
At this point, I’ve managed to get input to mplayer in linux working correctly. Mplayer has an interface intended for use with cards such as the PVR-150. However, I haven’t had much success with that interface yet.
Here’s a quick summary of how I got input working with the PVR-150:
1. (re)load the ivtv drivers
2. set what input sources you like (use v4l2-ctl — you’ll probably only need to use the “i” flag)
3. You’re ready to go (ish) you can video the input by running: “mplayer /dev/video0”
At this point I still have a significant problem with the input. Seems there’s too much data coming in for my machine, which is weird because I’ve got a pretty decent box doing this (P4 3GHz, 1GB Ram).
mplayer says: “Too many video packets in the buffer: (4096 in 7977572 bytes).
Maybe you are playing a non-interleaved stream/file or the codec failed?”
I’ll post a solution to that issue when I have one..
Okay, so I have a temporary solution to the buffer problem. My goal isn’t entirely to watch video as it comes in, but to capture it. So, with that in mind, if you just pipe the input from the PVR-150 to a file – it seems to keep up (which I would honestly expect nothing less). Just run:
cat /etc/video0 > test.mpg
Okay, so I guess it was actually pretty damned obvious that a reasonable solution for playback was to just call the -framedrop flag.
So to watch the playback and have stuff work out alright.. just call:
mplayer /dev/video0 -framedrop
I’ll post more on a procedure for capturing video with the intention of use for DVD production soon enough..
Okay, well, for now, all I’m gonna do is capture video using the above method, probably edit out stuff I don’t want in windows using VirtulDub and then make a DVD image with menus and all that using iDVD on my mac machine.
If I didn’t have the mac, I’d suggest you go with QDVDAuthor to make the DVD stuff. I haven’t used QDVDAuthor in awhile, but it had a lot of potential about 18 months ago.
I’m sorry to hear you couldn’t understand part of it, though that’s not too surprising. It’s mostly just my notes on the project as I figured it out for myself and then tried to post details for other people (and myself in the future).
What part was confusing?