Capturing video with Intel Smart Video Recorder III

[Steve O'Hara-Smith]

On Mon, 13 Jun 2005 23:44:38 -0400
David Wassman <dmwassman at cox.net> wrote:

> Please help. I am having some difficulty in capturing video with this 
> card.

	I notice that the card is reported as having no tuner - is this
in fact the case and what are you using as a video source ?

> I have compiled a new kernel with the bktr driver. I have tried 
> NuppelVideo:
> 
> nuvrec -n -V /dev/bktr0 -A /dev/dsp0.0 test
> 
> I get sound but just a blue screen. No video.

	Most brooktree based cards have several inputs (usually known as
devices for no obvious reason) for example mine has TV, S-Video and RCA
inputs. The blue screen is a classic symptom of having the wrong input
selected.

	Both nupplevideo and ffmpeg have the same capture code and respond
to the BKTR_DEV environment variable to select the input device (for me
1 selects TV, 2 S-Video and 3 RCA). Nuppelvideo and older (0.48 or earlier)
versions of ffmpeg also respond to BKTR_FORMAT (pal, ntsc, secam and a few
variants), recent versions of ffmpeg have the -tvstd parameter and set a
default of ntsc which overrides the BKTR_FORMAT environment variable.
Finally if you have a tuner setting BKTR_FREQ to a number in MHz can be used
to tune it.

> I have also tried ffmpeg:
> 
> ffmpeg -vd /dev/bktr0 -ad /dev/dsp0.0 test.mpg
> 
> I get an unusable file.

	Now for the ffmpeg warning - ffmpeg-049pre1 has dreadful A/V sync
problems when capturing, ffmpeg-devel is much better but still slips. The
golden version of ffmpeg for capture is 0.48 which won't slip sync no matter
what you do (i've tried with a make buildworld running at the same time, it
drops lots of frams and looks awful but the sync is good).

	If you like I can send you a port skeleton and distfile for
ffmpeg-0.48.

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