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#21
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Need Help for Multimedia Video Controller?
Frederick wrote:
On Fri, 01 Jul 2011 13:35:07 -0400, Paul wrote: Frederick wrote: My bad - I found a trial version of BeyondTV. Please ignore my last. BF The main purpose of running BeyondTV Trial, would be to verify whether your card works well for the intended purpose. A basic hardware test. If the trial lasts long enough, perhaps you can complete any projects you had planned for the setup. If the trial doesn't last long enough, you can return to MythTV. I got around to installing MythBuntu on the test machine, but I have no tuner over there to test with. What I did discover, is the "back end" will exit (won't stay running), if it can't make a tuner work. So MythBuntu 11.04 is just as much "fun" as the older versions were. It requires fiddling about, Google searches (like "how do I start mythbackend"). I'll be testing the tuner later today. I gave it a USB webcam to play with, but that doesn't have "channel change" functions, so mythbackend "threw a wobbly". Paul I tried BeyondTV with my PCI Wintv tuner card, and it looks as though it is trying to work - it wants a TV channel (32). But here there are no analog channels over the air that I know of. Only digital. Why it picked 32 I have no idea, since I have no antenna. But anyway, what I really wanted was to be able to connect a VCR to the card to use to convert VHS tapes to DVD. So far I see no way to tell BeyondTV to accept anything except a TV channel or maybe pre-recorded TV program files as input. BeyondTV has a provision for burning disks. looks like. It did recognize the card though I think. I am going to play around with it some more in the hope that I have missed something. Big Fred Well, I finished my MythBuntu experiment, and it's another fail. I tried to get the stupid thing to do a "channel scan". MythTV pretends to scan, but the "dwell time" on each channel is too short. I have a fair idea how fast the tuner is on my WinTV card, and MythTV goes through the channels too fast. Then, it barfs later when you select "Watch TV", because it doesn't really have any channels. The screen goes blank and the "esc" key doesn't work. I need to use "control-alt-F1" to get to a console (text) window, so I have some options to controlling the machine. When I use control-alt-F6 or F7 or the like, to get back to XWindows, by then it has recovered. MythTV does have options to select signals from the four inputs on my card (TV, composite 1, composite 3, S-video). And I was only testing the TV option, because setting up a composite signal would be more work. I did use Synaptic Package Manager in MythBuntu, and selected and installed "TVTime" program. It knows about my card type, and the program works pretty well immediately. It did a channel scan, and only saved the strong channels. Then, I could use the onscreen display to change channels. I'm not sure that records to file though. What that did for me, is prove the tuner is OK and working. But running the MythTV back end setup later, it still can't find channels, and "spins" through the channels too fast. So something is disconnected in the software stack. I looked at some log file, and it didn't shed any light on what was broken. So I've pulled the Mythbuntu disk, and the machine is back to running Windows again. So my track record 1) First time installation several years ago - works 2) Second time installation - "No tuner" 3) Third time installation - "No channels" It's a good thing I burned MythBuntu on a DVD+RW, so now I can reuse the disc :-) Paul |
#22
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Need Help for Multimedia Video Controller?
On Fri, 01 Jul 2011 21:33:13 -0400, Paul wrote:
Well, I finished my MythBuntu experiment, and it's another fail. I tried to get the stupid thing to do a "channel scan". MythTV pretends to scan, but the "dwell time" on each channel is too short. I have a fair idea how fast the tuner is on my WinTV card, and MythTV goes through the channels too fast. Then, it barfs later when you select "Watch TV", because it doesn't really have any channels. The screen goes blank and the "esc" key doesn't work. I need to use "control-alt-F1" to get to a console (text) window, so I have some options to controlling the machine. When I use control-alt-F6 or F7 or the like, to get back to XWindows, by then it has recovered. MythTV does have options to select signals from the four inputs on my card (TV, composite 1, composite 3, S-video). And I was only testing the TV option, because setting up a composite signal would be more work. I did use Synaptic Package Manager in MythBuntu, and selected and installed "TVTime" program. It knows about my card type, and the program works pretty well immediately. It did a channel scan, and only saved the strong channels. Then, I could use the onscreen display to change channels. I'm not sure that records to file though. What that did for me, is prove the tuner is OK and working. But running the MythTV back end setup later, it still can't find channels, and "spins" through the channels too fast. So something is disconnected in the software stack. I looked at some log file, and it didn't shed any light on what was broken. So I've pulled the Mythbuntu disk, and the machine is back to running Windows again. So my track record 1) First time installation several years ago - works 2) Second time installation - "No tuner" 3) Third time installation - "No channels" It's a good thing I burned MythBuntu on a DVD+RW, so now I can reuse the disc :-) Paul Wow Paul! Thanks for spending your time on this. What chance do I have if you are having no luck. I made a disk with Mythbuntu, but a CD, not a CD-RW. But that's ok, I'll just pitch it. I'll keep my Xubuntu CD's though if only to give me a chance one day to play with the Ubuntu OS. Late last nite I stole some time to spend with BeyondTV and my Hauppauge card, using the guides you provided references to last. My 4.9.3 version of BeyondTV seems to show different screens/selections from those shown in the guides. But I set it up as best I could. Made no difference. Not even when I tried RF (coax) and Composite separately and combined. Still wants to set things up for channel 32 (public TV?). I intend to try for more time today. TX agin Big Fred |
#23
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Need Help for Multimedia Video Controller?
On Sat, 02 Jul 2011 06:50:27 -0400, Frederick
wrote: Wow Paul! Thanks for spending your time on this. What chance do I have if you are having no luck. I made a disk with Mythbuntu, but a CD, not a CD-RW. But that's ok, I'll just pitch it. I'll keep my Xubuntu CD's though if only to give me a chance one day to play with the Ubuntu OS. Late last nite I stole some time to spend with BeyondTV and my Hauppauge card, using the guides you provided references to last. My 4.9.3 version of BeyondTV seems to show different screens/selections from those shown in the guides. But I set it up as best I could. Made no difference. Not even when I tried RF (coax) and Composite separately and combined. Still wants to set things up for channel 32 (public TV?). I intend to try for more time today. TX agin Big Fred Hey Paul - Know anything about Avs4you softwares (avs4you.com)? I downloaded a test version of their AVS VIDEO RECORDER that provides 2-minute samples of recordings. It recognized my Hauppauge tuner card, which I wired up with Composite linkage to my VCR. When I set up AVS correctly (mainly for Composite), it captured into mpg files 2-minute cuts of a pre-recorded movie I had on play in the VCR. The audio sounded pretty good, but the video was some grainy. But at least it worked! I might have to buy this package! Big Fred |
#24
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Need Help for Multimedia Video Controller?
Frederick wrote:
On Sat, 02 Jul 2011 06:50:27 -0400, Frederick wrote: Wow Paul! Thanks for spending your time on this. What chance do I have if you are having no luck. I made a disk with Mythbuntu, but a CD, not a CD-RW. But that's ok, I'll just pitch it. I'll keep my Xubuntu CD's though if only to give me a chance one day to play with the Ubuntu OS. Late last nite I stole some time to spend with BeyondTV and my Hauppauge card, using the guides you provided references to last. My 4.9.3 version of BeyondTV seems to show different screens/selections from those shown in the guides. But I set it up as best I could. Made no difference. Not even when I tried RF (coax) and Composite separately and combined. Still wants to set things up for channel 32 (public TV?). I intend to try for more time today. TX agin Big Fred Hey Paul - Know anything about Avs4you softwares (avs4you.com)? I downloaded a test version of their AVS VIDEO RECORDER that provides 2-minute samples of recordings. It recognized my Hauppauge tuner card, which I wired up with Composite linkage to my VCR. When I set up AVS correctly (mainly for Composite), it captured into mpg files 2-minute cuts of a pre-recorded movie I had on play in the VCR. The audio sounded pretty good, but the video was some grainy. But at least it worked! I might have to buy this package! Big Fred It's a pretty big download for a "video recorder". Apparently, it has some editing or output options. http://onlinehelp.avs4you.com/AVS-Vi...der/index.aspx You'll notice, on PDF page 6 of the manual, there is sample rate information. Perhaps the low sample rate is what makes it grainy ? At low sample rate, I'd expect to see "blotchy" rather than "grainy". MPEG encoding, such as a card like the PVR 250 might do, is lossy. MPEG encoding uses "macroblocks", and that is what would contribute to "blotchy" if the sampling rate is dialed way down. The purpose of the PVR-250 producing MPEG output, is to save disk space. (My WinTV card, which lacks compression, produces 136GB of data for a movie slightly longer than 2 hours.) Some of the video encoding schemes, can cut the data rate by a factor of 100, at the expense of image quality. But only so much capture quality makes sense for a VCR output, because the VCR itself and the NTSC output format are limiting factors. So dialing the sample rate "to the wall", just creates more gigabytes of well capture VCR noises. http://onlinehelp.avs4you.com/downlo...corderHelp.pdf While looking in the AVS program, write down what sample rates it is offering you. Then, go back and research the PVR 250 from Hauppauge, and see whether what AVS is accessing, is the full capability of a PVR 250 (with either of the two chipsets it can be designed with). With regard to how your VCR can play back, you may have two options. The VCR may have an S-Video or Composite output (baseband). Or, the VCR may have an RF (75 ohm) output, transmitting on Channel 3 NTSC. You can test both of those, assuming the video recorder program supports channel changing. If the Hauppauge has an analog tuner as well as baseband inputs, you can test both of those to see which gives a better picture. On my VCR, the two methods differ in color depth slightly. One of the problems I have with different multimedia devices, is adjusting the output resolution, sampling rate and the like. I've on more than one occasion, used a program that allows me to view video, but it's set to the wrong resolution (like 384 x 240), and then there is no way to change it. Programs like DScaler, include filtering functions for the video. These can improve the appearance slightly (perhaps softening the image a bit, making the background noise in the received picture a bit easier to deal with). But they don't generally remove "head roll" if you're playing tapes on the VCR. When I transferred three cassettes here, I needed to alter the X*Y resolution of the video, and chop off the bottom ten pixels, to remove the head roll noise. There was still several more pixel rows of head noise, but the amplitude wasn't large enough to bother with. It took me an inordinate amount of time, to do that kind of processing (using free tools, in Linux and Windows, many many failed recipes...). Capturing the video, is only a small part of the process, time wise. Paul |
#25
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Need Help for Multimedia Video Controller?
On Sat, 02 Jul 2011 12:15:02 -0400, Paul wrote:
It's a pretty big download for a "video recorder". Apparently, it has some editing or output options. http://onlinehelp.avs4you.com/AVS-Vi...der/index.aspx You'll notice, on PDF page 6 of the manual, there is sample rate information. Perhaps the low sample rate is what makes it grainy ? At low sample rate, I'd expect to see "blotchy" rather than "grainy". MPEG encoding, such as a card like the PVR 250 might do, is lossy. MPEG encoding uses "macroblocks", and that is what would contribute to "blotchy" if the sampling rate is dialed way down. The purpose of the PVR-250 producing MPEG output, is to save disk space. (My WinTV card, which lacks compression, produces 136GB of data for a movie slightly longer than 2 hours.) Some of the video encoding schemes, can cut the data rate by a factor of 100, at the expense of image quality. But only so much capture quality makes sense for a VCR output, because the VCR itself and the NTSC output format are limiting factors. So dialing the sample rate "to the wall", just creates more gigabytes of well capture VCR noises. http://onlinehelp.avs4you.com/downlo...corderHelp.pdf While looking in the AVS program, write down what sample rates it is offering you. Then, go back and research the PVR 250 from Hauppauge, and see whether what AVS is accessing, is the full capability of a PVR 250 (with either of the two chipsets it can be designed with). With regard to how your VCR can play back, you may have two options. The VCR may have an S-Video or Composite output (baseband). Or, the VCR may have an RF (75 ohm) output, transmitting on Channel 3 NTSC. You can test both of those, assuming the video recorder program supports channel changing. If the Hauppauge has an analog tuner as well as baseband inputs, you can test both of those to see which gives a better picture. On my VCR, the two methods differ in color depth slightly. One of the problems I have with different multimedia devices, is adjusting the output resolution, sampling rate and the like. I've on more than one occasion, used a program that allows me to view video, but it's set to the wrong resolution (like 384 x 240), and then there is no way to change it. Programs like DScaler, include filtering functions for the video. These can improve the appearance slightly (perhaps softening the image a bit, making the background noise in the received picture a bit easier to deal with). But they don't generally remove "head roll" if you're playing tapes on the VCR. When I transferred three cassettes here, I needed to alter the X*Y resolution of the video, and chop off the bottom ten pixels, to remove the head roll noise. There was still several more pixel rows of head noise, but the amplitude wasn't large enough to bother with. It took me an inordinate amount of time, to do that kind of processing (using free tools, in Linux and Windows, many many failed recipes...). Capturing the video, is only a small part of the process, time wise. Paul Paul - I burned some five 2-minute MPG files that resulted from AVS Video Recorder (MPEG-2 I think) onto a DVD-RW and played it on my HDTV. Almost unviewable. Very bad resolution. I need to play with that. It might help. Big Fred |
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