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Re: [AG-TECH] Has Anyone got the WinTV PVR 150 to work with VIC?

The big technical hurdle here is that you can't get raw video from the PVR cards, only encoded MPEG-2. In order to use this in VIC, it has to be decoded first, so it's not just writing an interface (the ivtv drivers don't even expose V4L, as far as I know), it's also writing an mpeg2 decoder that works fast enough to feed vic with raw frame data (for subsequent re-encoding into H.261) without having lag issues in the video that are less than useful (which is something that will be difficult, given the minimum GOP issues, but shouldn't be impossible). So, all around, not impossible, probably, but not a trivial issue.

Justin Binns

Proshanta Saha wrote:

Hi Chris,

Yes, I am using multiple WinTV PVR 150 cards in both Windows and Linux
Environments. I'm going to try to debug the window environment VIC to
see why VFW does not seem to like the caputer card at all. I would
certainly like to use it under linux so that I can set the source
while adding the service. I understand the concerns over IVTV's
drivers, it still appears to be in a fairly beta release. However, if
someone can point me to the particular modules using V4L drivers, I
can try to see if I can convice it to use IVTV instead. Is the
Berkeley repository for VIC still the defacto place for the CVS
snapshots?

While I'm debugging this I think I'll go on a hunting mission to find
if we have some Hauppauge WinTV PCI (model 401) lying around. It
appears to be missing from the shelves in most stores, probably gonna
be hard to get through our authorized vendors. The politics of vendor
list is quite messy, and we're generally restricted to only them. But
before I do is there a list of cards that VIC supports under linux
using V4L?

In regards to VLC, you are allowed to use multiple instances and
multiple streams, I'm trying to tinker with the tool to allow me to
view multiple streams while its being sent to the destination IP. Nice
tool, I think the DV and HDV group of the extended video
producer/consumer service project has some literature, but not enough
documentation on how to configure multipe streams.

Proshanta



On 8/15/05, Christoph Willing <willing@itee.uq.edu.au> wrote:

On 15/08/2005, at 4:32 PM, Proshanta Saha wrote:


I've literally gone through, what seems like a couple of hundred
threads, to find if someone was successful with using the WinTV PVR
150.

I have a dual boot machine with both Window XP SP2 and Fedora Core 3.
I've successfully tested and made sure that the cards work perfectly
(audio and video wise). Unfortunately I am not able to get VIC to use
the sources. In Windows XP I get the usual "terminated in an unusual
way" error. In Linux I get waiting for video which seems like an
eternity, and when I click on transmit it explodes. I read the log,
which was quite useful in linux, it appears not to have passed in the
correct parameters to use the card. As it appears to be a V4L widget
there were no ways to get IVTV controls to work. Does VIC care if it's
has a hardware video encoder?

Proshanta,

The PVR150 can't be recognised by vic at the moment because no one has
written the interface module for vic which allows it to use the IVTV
driver. Its on our list of things to do because we have some PVR250
cards we want to use, but have had no time for it yet.



I can use extended video producer and vlc, but VLC appears to allow me
to transmit only 1 stream, not the multiple streams I'd like to
transmit.

Does that mean you're trying multiple PVR150 cards in the same machine?
It means, at least, that you'd need multiple instances of VLC (just as
you need multiple instances of vic if you want multiple ordinary video
streams). Is that possible? I've never tried it myself.


chris


Christoph Willing Ph: +61 7 3365 8350
QPSF Access Grid Manager
University of Queensland