Need Help for Multimedia Video Controller?

[Frederick]

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

 

[Frederick]

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

 

[Paul]

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-Video-Recorder/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/downloads/AVSVideoRecorderHelp.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

 

[Frederick]

It's a pretty big download for a "video recorder". Apparently, it
has some editing or output options.

http://onlinehelp.avs4you.com/AVS-Video-Recorder/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/downloads/AVSVideoRecorderHelp.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