On Fri, Dec 16, 2016 at 7:54 PM, King Beowulf <kingbeow...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 15, 2016 at 08:25 Erik Lane <erikl...@gmail.com> wrote: > > [snip...] > > > > > > > No one is an expert until you ask questions and fiddle around... > > I haven't used tvtime so not sure of the underlying caoture libraries. > > I would try ffmpeg. mplayer/mencoder can be cranky unless the video format > is absolutely correct - also depends how you distro compiled the package. > > ffmpeg is more flexible and gives lots of feedback on the CLI. If the > capture card runs via v4l2 it should work. > > Thanks for the suggestion! I wasn't aware that ffmpeg would take input straight from a card, but I guess it makes sense. This box is reasonably powerful, with 4 cores, but I'm a little worried that transcoding would cause it to miss a frame here or there. I really don't know what kind of power it might take to handle the stream. I know that ffmpeg has a command to simply copy the input to the output with a wrapper around it for some formats at least, so I'll have to see what it can do with a raw stream. I see an example of a simple command to save the input as 'cat /dev/video0 > filename.ts' and if that works then I might do ffmpeg afterwards to turn it into mp4. Though if ffmpeg can save straight to .ts with raw data, that will be another thing I can try. To give added info, since my last post I found out VLC could record from a capture card, as well as stream from one. When I tried it the recording worked well for a while, but ended up with errors in the video file that spit out errors on the command line of missing timestamps and the audio went AWOL somewhere in there. (I started VLC from the command line to easily see the errors.) It actually worked well for about half an hour each time before failing, so I suspect that it might be running out of memory. I have no evidence for that, though. The streaming option looked like everything was good from the GUI, but the command line spit out some errors about missing files, and the video never got sent to a file that I could find. Of course I tried many times with different options and different file names in different directories. I also wiped out the box and started over with mythbuntu, thinking an all in one solution would 'just work' and then I could get this done. It failed. It found the card, but then when I got to a screen where it was going to scan for channels, it couldn't initialize the card. I tried for hours with every variation I could come up with, but no luck. I'll try a bit more in the morning before reinstalling my old system and then seeing if the simple cat or ffmpeg will grab it. I only need to save about 10 old VHS tapes from being lost to history, so manual processes are perfectly acceptable. Once I'm done with this, fingers crossed I won't need to do something like this again. (Well, until the next friend comes up with an old irreplaceable tape or whatever.) :) Thanks for the suggestions! Erik _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
