Experiences with the easycap DC60 audio and video capture adapter on Linux

This Blog is dedicated to all owners of the STK1160 chip based EasyCAP (or identical) devices, who want to use it under Linux.

Activating audio for the STK1160 device: read the this post

German speaking users: read my article on ubuntuusers.de

The EasyCAP DC60 and its clones are cheap little USB analogue capturing devices which can be used for viewing and recording video under Linux from different sources like VHS tape recorders, satellitereceivers, camcorders ...

Sunday, February 12, 2012

More Information

In the last few weeks I altered some pages and I added some more information to my blog:
  • Practice page has been created.
  • The Drivers and Installation pages have been updated and put together.
  • I've tested the recent stk11xx driver with my EasyCAP DC60.
    Read more on the Drivers and Installation page.
  • I found out, that the recent easycapdriver is only capable of 22.75 fps (PAL).
    Read more on the bottom of the Quickstart page.
  • A description of a DIY surveillance installation, provided by a reader of this blog, including EasyCAP related hints for Windows has been published.
  • Some more corrections and updates have been applied, but there is still a lot to be done.

Average more than hundred visitors daily spur me on to make this blog better.

Some people emailed to me, and I like to help if I can.
Feel free to comment or email if you have any question or contribution.

Andrew

7 comments:

  1. Hi Been working on my easycap with mplayer, but only getting black and white output. Seems that any norm setting I put on my command line is ignored/rejected by mplayer. Any way to overcome this problem? Bimma

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It's OK, sorted it out this morning, needed obscure norm=NTSC_M_JP to get color ?? :)

      Delete
    2. Hi, just saw your comment today. Would be interesting if vlc or tvtime detect the norm automatically or not.
      I'm planning an EasyCAP FAQ page here, and all those experiences will be added there.
      Andrew

      Delete
  2. Now have another problem. mplayer just gives a green screen the first time I start it up with easycap. I have to exit mplayer then start again, this time I get video. (This is on a carpc with a composite reverse camera). Any suggestions about how to either initialize easycap before running mplayer, or how to get easycap to reset itself if it doesn't show a video?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi, here are some suggestions but I don't know if it helps:
    1. The easycpdriver needs about 7 seconds to be fully loaded (on my system), maybe you started mplayer before the driver was fully loaded.
    2. I know that sometimes a green screen appears when mplayer is started but after some seconds mplayer shows video.
    3. You can try to start mplayer with this simple command:
    mplayer tv://
    (if you have /dev/video0 and you need no sound playback).
    4. The only working way to initialize the Easycap i know is, to plug it out an in again.

    Andrew

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hi, my video source is a GoPro camera which delivers a color picture on two different monitors.Only when I connect it to the DC60 (Ubuntu 12.04 and 11.xx tested) I only get a black and white picture. On Linux I tested with cheese and mplayer. I tried all different norms as shown in the README of the easycap kernel module without sucess - only black and white picture. The video source is PAL. Every time I tried a NTSC norm the picture changed to the gray striped test screen after some seconds. Any suggestions what I could try to get colors in my picture?

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  5. Hi Johannes, i can only guess what could be the reason. I googled the GoPro camera and found out that it has two (or three?) different outputs: component video and composite video. I suppose that only the composite video output works with the Easycap. Maybe the HD picture causes the problem because the Easycap can only capture 720X576 px.
    You can try to leave out the norm and width and height in the mplayer command because mplayer can detect these settings by itself. You can also try to use another input number, on the EasycapDC60 the yellow CVBS has number 0 or 1 and S-Video has 5.
    Thats all I can say.
    Andrew

    ReplyDelete

Please be patient, your comment will be published as soon as I'm checking my mailbox next time.
So, I will notice your comment for sure. Andrew