Xuel's Blog

Waaaaait. You're using Ubuntu to be a monitor for your 800XL? Cool! But...how does it work?

Good eye.

 

I am using a Pinnacle Dazzle DVC 100 video capture card. I found it for $2 at Goodwill. It's not the best for playing games because there is a lot of latency, but it's OK for demos and such. There are a lot of ways to feed the video/audio capture to your screen and speakers in real time, but they are all a little flaky, I've found.

 

mplayer is currently the only way I can get both the video and the audio to work, but the latency is pretty bad:

 

mplayer tv:// -tv driver=v4l2:norm=PAL:device=/dev/video0:audiorate=48000:immediatemode=0:forceaudio:adevice=/dev/dsp2:forcechan=1 -vf pp=lb

 

gstreamer seems to have the lowest latency and the deinterlace feature is very nice for taking the 25 fps output of the capture card and up-converting to 50 fps. Though lately, the sound is just a horrible buzz. Perhaps there is a driver problem, or probably I'm building the stream incorrectly. Here's my script:

 

v4lctl setinput Composite1
v4lctl setnorm PAL
gst-launch-0.10 v4l2src ! deinterlace ! queue ! autovideosink alsasrc device=hw:2,0 ! deinterleave ! alsasink sync=false

 

I've also tried cheese, vlc and xawtv.

 

Hmmm, I just discovered tvtime. Looks promising... Doh! The sound is buzzing there too. Well, I need to do more research.

 

Edit: corrected DVC 100 link.