Ronald S. Bultje wrote:
First and foremost, I'd suggest to read the documentation. Some of the issues you mention aren't actually bugs; they're intended that way or unfixeable.
I read through the Documentation/FAQ (all the documentation I could find), and couldn't find any mention of the issues I mentioned. :-(
On Mon, 2005-02-14 at 13:24, Gordan wrote:
1) I can use xawtv to display the picture, but it tends to skip a lot. Almost like the card is skipping interrupts - except that it sometimes gets stuck for 30+ seconds at a time. I've tried two different slots to remove this issue, and it didn't seem to make much difference. I'll try the other two slots later and see if that fixes the problem.
This may indicate a very poor source input. Could that be true? If not, are you running NTSC or PAL?
I am running PAL. What do you mean by poor source input? Poor image quality (e.g. a worn out VHS tape)? Or poor _signal_ quality (i.e. a bad or too long cable)?
The signal quality should be good as it's going straight from a tape deck to the card, with a pretty decent cable.
The same setup works perfectly on the bt848 hardware.
2) When using mplayer to view the live stream, using: mplayer -tv driver=v4l:device=/dev/video0:input=0 tv:// I get this error: ioctl set picture failed: Invalid argument
3) xawtv capture also doesn't seem to work. It, too, complains about an invalid ioctl when trying to capture, but not when trying to view the live stream.
This is not a driver bug; it's a hardware "bug". This should be in the FAQ, but it's not. Search for 'zoran' and 'bigphysarea' on google, you'll find it soon enough. The hardware is not designed for this. It cannot do it.
Sorry, I lost you there - what is it that the hardware cannot do?
I will apply the patch and try again. What will the patch make work? Will it fix the ioctl errors?
4) lavrec seems to be capturing a MJPEG stream, but there encoded stream seems to be corrupted. It is all blue, and at full PAL resolution, the video stream seems garbled, as if it is being displayed in strips that should be below each other, but have been misaligned, as if the sync signal was wrong. At lower resolutions (either set using the geometry option or the decimation option), the stream doesn't seem to be garbled, but instead seems to be cropped (rather than scaled) to the top left corner of the stream.
I am not sure if this is a decoder problem, because I can only play it back using "mplayer -vo x11". Not sure what the default output is (SDL?), but my graphics card seems to have problems with it - the display window is just blank blue.
For blue: then SDL (or, actaully, Xv) is buggy...
I figured. But either way, "-vo x11" works as a workaround for the solid blue.
As for mplayer, it'll only play the top field for full-PAL movies, so only -d2 will actually work fine.
So, the recorded mjpeg stream is actually OK, but it needs to be transcoded into something else to make it properly readable?
I tried the -d2 option, but I was still only getting the cropped rather than scaled picture. Is this again a deficiency of mplayer, or is something else going wrong?
As for the --geometry option, see man lavrec: it's not what you think it is.
Oh, I see. So the --geometry option sets the viewport size on the full frame? So, to get a _scaled_ capture I should only use the -d option? I'm sure I tried that and I was still getting the cropped area, rather than a scaled version. But I will try it again and make sure.
I _THINK_ that the zoran/DC30 driver seems to be broken in some way, because I can use all the same software without any spurious ioctl problems using my cheapo bt848 based card, and that works perfectly (apart from the fact that the frame rates are quite poor without hardware compression).
I think I need to update some of the docs... ;).
I'll try the things you suggested above. :-)
Thanks.
Gordan
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