Capturing video with Intel Smart Video Recorder III

[dmwassman at cox.net]

Steve,

Thanks for the help. I haven't had too much experience with video capture and the handbook is a little thin on this.

Steve O'Hara-Smith wrote:

>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 the card hooked up to a VCR thru a composite cable. I didn't do the research when I bought the card on Ebay and was under the impression it came with a tuner until I received it. Is this going to be a problem (other than I have to set the VCR to anything I want to capture)?

>>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.

I thought so myself as it looks like a VCR blue screen when the wrong input is selected yet I cannot figure out how to change the input.

>
>	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.

So it is an environment variable and not the two devices setup thru bktr (ie bktr and bktr0)? I will try this when I get home. I will let you know how it works out. Is this set in /etc/profile or is there another config I need to set this variable in to use it after system start up?

>
>>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.
>
I rather get NuppelVideo working as it uses less CPU. I am using a old computer (PII 400 w 256MB) to do this capture and am concerned with the capture rate and quality. Again, I am completely new to this video stuff, so if you think ffmpeg is better, I will give it a try.

David Wassman