mythtv: non-cable video source

[acomputerdood]

hey guys,

my pvr-150 has the normal cable-in in the back of the card, but it also has an s-video and composite-in back there, too. i was wondering if it were possible (and how to do it) to use those second two to play video from an alternative source (say, my video camera) through my capture card, and have mythtv record it.

is there an easy way to do this? or i suppose i could just use a different combination of programs to import them to the box, outside of mythtv.


thanks!

[acomputerdood]

my pvr-150 has the normal cable-in in the back of the card, but it also has an s-video and composite-in back there, too. i was wondering if it were possible (and how to do it) to use those second two to play video from an alternative source (say, my video camera) through my capture card, and have mythtv record it.

is there an easy way to do this? or i suppose i could just use a different combination of programs to import them to the box, outside of mythtv.

well, i figured out a way to do this. turns out it is possible in mythtv, it's just irritating. you've got to go into the mythtv-setup, manually create a channel and assign it a number (say, 1100), then add that channel to a channel lineup, and then add that channel lineup to the "composite in" video source on the card. THEN, you've got to restart the backend, go to the front end, manually configure a recording time, tell it to record, run to the other room (optional) to start the camcorder playback, and then wait.

i decided to scrap mythtv for this altogether. just use ivtvctl to change the input on the card ("ivtvctl -p 2" for composite, i think). then you can just dump directly from the video device ("cat /dev/video0 > myvideo.mpg"). so i wrote a shell script that would do the "cat" and put it in the background ("cat /dev/video0 > myvideo.mpg &"), sleep for a certain number of minutes, and then kill the cat (heh).

of course, you can't be recording anything else with mythv at the time. one thing i was worried about was that i would have to then go back with ivtvctl and change all the settings back to how they were for mythtv so that it would continue to work. turns out that mythtv handles all that stuff automatically.

NOTE: i believe newer versions of ivtv do not use ivtvctl, so you have to figure out how to use v4l-ctl (or something like that).

[RoundsToZero]

Well, needing to assign a channel number is strange but I guess it's possible. As for recording, what you can do is just put it on Live TV, use the C key to change inputs to composite, and start playing on the camera. On the frontend what you can do is hit the R key which turns the current Live TV broadcast into a regular recording, including anything that played since you started watching Live TV (since it had a buffer even before you press R). On 0.20 and up, at least.

[chrismcdirty]

You should just be able to set it up as a new input in mythtv-setup. I do all of my recording from a composite source, but also have definitions for coaxial and the second composite.