Ubuntu
xawtv package

Change tv/video card inputs

Asked by Patrick M

I an using a Hauppague wincast pvr card with the bt848 chipset. It has composite, s-video and the obsolete ntsc broadcast inputs. XAwtv will allow me to change the input, but not the default which is ntsc broadcast, the insturctions don't seem to work right. Neither does the recordong feature. xawtv will play though. Other programs don't give this option to change the inputs and try to open the ntsc broadcast by default. how can I change these values to open Composite1 or s-video, which are the inputs I would want? Ideally I would want the input value set "globally", as the default setting. I am using Ubuntu 10.10 with Ubuntu Studio. I have bttv and V4l2 installed, as well as xawtv. Another alternative: If I could get the output of xaw to another program, such as "lives", "vlc" of "winff" I could create video files from the video card. Is there an app to control bt848 cards? If not, how about a lesson or two about doing it on the command line?

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Patrick M
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Patrick M (prmillius) said : 		#1

I figured it out>
PLEASE KEEP THIS UP FOR OTHERS!!

The problem was the default video player for LiVES, which is mplayer. To use the bt848 driver with LiVES to capture analog video You have to change the default playback to tvtime,or xawtv. Mplayer cannot open the card properly, as it tries to use v4l2 instead of bttv to open the bt848 chipset.....;

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Patrick M (prmillius) said : 		#2

You have to set the decoder back to mplayer before you shut down lives, or both applications will try and access the card when you restart, and neither will be able to. This is admittedly only a work around to the whole analog to digital disconnect with Linux. This roughshod method does work most of the time.