Using 2 TV Capture Cards with Different Drivers

This page describes a freevo configuration to support many different and heterogeneous capture cards.

Example One

In the following, we will see an example for managing two cards,

• an IVTV card, that is an analog-to-MPEG capture card (Hauppauge WinTV PVR-150) and
• a DVB-T card (ASUS 3000M mini).

Recording is done by the generic recording plugin.

First of all, create the following scripts, that are capable of recording from the two devices. For DVB-T we use /home/freevo/bin/record-dvb , that contains

#!/bin/sh
#arguments :
# channel_name_or_number frequency_in_MHz seconds_to_record output_filename
exec mencoder dvb://"$1" -quiet -ovc copy -oac copy -endpos "$3" -of mpeg  -o "$4"

while /home/freevo/bin/record-ivtv contains

#!/bin/sh
#arguments :
# channel_name_or_number frequency_in_MHz seconds_to_record output_filename
ivtv-tune -f "$2"
exec mencoder /dev/video0  -quiet -ovc copy -oac copy -endpos "$3" -of mpeg -o "$4"

Do not forget to 'chmod a+x' the two scripts. Note that the two scripts accept the same parameter list (and ignore unneeded parameters).

Then set up the cards in /etc/freevo/local.conf, using different video groups, as in this example

TV_VIDEO_GROUPS = [
   # Hauppage analog capture card
   #lspci: Internext Compression Inc iTVC16 (CX23416) MPEG-2 Encoder (rev 01)
   VideoGroup( # ivtv device, group 0
             desc='Hauppauge WinTV PVR-150',
             group_type='ivtv',
             vdev='/dev/video0',
             vvbi='/dev/vbi0',
             adev=None,
             input_type='Tuner 1',
             input_num=0,
             tuner_norm="PAL",
             tuner_chanlist='italy',
             record_group=0),
  #ASUS 3000M mini,  USB DVB-T gadget
   VideoGroup( # dvb device, group 1
              vdev='/dev/dvb/adapter0',
              adev=None,
              input_type='tuner',
              input_num=0,
              group_type = 'dvb',
              record_group=1,
              desc='DVB Viewer'),
   ]

For the following step, you may need to apply a patch that adds a new field to VCR_CMD, called `group-type'. With this patch, it is easy to record from different sources.

Indeed, we set the VCR_CMD to call different scripts for different video cards, as follows

VCR_CMD = ('/home/freevo/bin/record-%(group-type)s ' +
            ' "%(channel)s" "%(frequencyMHz)s" "%(seconds)s" "%(filename)s"')

Eventually we set up channels for different cards, as follows

TV_CHANNELS = [('www.rete4.com', 'rete 4', 'Rete 4', None, 1 ),  #<- from DVB
               ('www.canale5.com', 'canale 5', '38', None, 0,),  #<- from analog input
              ]

As you see, in the 5th field we set the group (that is 0 for analog, 1 for DVB-T) while in the 3rd field we set either the channel name (for DVB) or the channel number (for analog).

Example Two

This example shows a DVB card being used for regular viewing and recording and an IVTV card being used for S-Video capture (to watch the old VHS videos)

The DVB card is card 0 and the IVTV card is card 1.

TV_VIDEO_GROUPS = [
   VideoGroup(
              vdev='/dev/dvb/adapter0',
              adev=None,
              input_type='tuner',
              input_num=1,
              group_type = 'dvb',
              record_group=0,
              desc='DVB Viewer'),

   VideoGroup(
             desc='S-Video Input',
             group_type='ivtv',
             vdev='/dev/video0',
             adev=None,
             input_type='S-Video 1',
             input_num=2,
             tuner_type='external',
             record_group=1
             )
]

The last line on the TV channels will use card 1 (here the ivtv card) and has no TV guide entries.

TV_CHANNELS = [
        ( 'sbshd.free.au', 'SBS HD' , 'SBS HD', '', 0 ),
        ( 'abchd.free.au' ,'ABC HD' , 'ABC HDTV', None, 0  ),
        ( '', 'Video', 'None', 'None', '1'),
        ]