Greetings, I have freevo set up and running on a computer connected to a television. After going through the configuration slowly and carefully, I think I have it set up pretty well for recording and watching shows.
One thing I wasn't able to set up to my liking was the mixer. I tried having freevo control all audio at first, and that worked well. I could watch live tv and the sound would turn on when I started watching and turn off when I was done. I set up a VCR_PRE_REC script according to some web pages to set the appropriate levels and capture device for recording tv, and that worked well. In addition, freevo did the right thing and wouldn't allow me to watch live tv while recording, since I only have one tuner card - good so far. The problem with the setup I describe happens when I try to watch a recording while a show is being recorded. The plugin that launches mplayer sets the mixer to values that mute the recording in progress, which is bad. At this point, I went and looked through the source code to see what the various plugins do when they're called. My observation is that the mixer settings are fiddled with far more than necessary. Neither the video player nor the live tv player should ever mute the recording input, but both of them do. On my machine, an ideal setup would leave all the mixer settings alone, unmute the line out on the sound card when watching live tv, and allow the user to raise and lower a single volume setting of his choosing to control the global volume level (PCM or VOL I suppose). Instead, freevo resets the volume on the recording portion of the sound card, screwing up the audio in recordings. What is the reason for the plugins to be written this way? Perhaps others' sound card mixer settings work differently from mine, but at least for me, the 'line' setting determines what sound I hear from the tuner during live tv, the 'capture' setting determines how loud recorded audio will be, and the two settings are independent. As long as I toggle the capture setting to on for both 'line' and 'capture' (in alsamixer) and set the 'capture' volume appropriately, I get audio from my recordings. The recording doesn't pay attention to the volume setting of 'line' or if it is muted. Playing live tv directly from the capture card, I need to unmute 'line' and set its level to something appropriate (for me 100%), then remute it when I am done viewing live tv. Currently I have CONTROL_ALL_AUDIO set to 0 in my local_config.py, which guarantees my recordings will have uninterrupted audio, still lets recorded shows and other videos play back with the correct volume, but makes it so watching live tv is silent. That isn't a problem, really, since live tv is currently silly when I can just change the channel on the tv and get to the channel I want to see. However, it would be neat if it worked correctly without me telling freevo to lay off the mixer. Is there an alternate mixer plugin that just unmutes 'line' when playing live tv and remutes it when not playing, and that otherwise leaves the mixer alone? Buckley ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys-and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ Freevo-users mailing list Freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users
