Mtvcgui updated

Santiago Bruno, the developer of mtvcgui, informed me about the new version (1.0.2) of his great program he has released some days ago.

"One of the new features in this release is that it queries mplayer to get the list of supported norms, so it should report the correct values," he reports.

The other great new feature is, that he provides booth a .deb and .rpm package, which installs (and adds a launcher to the menu), and runs (I've tested the .deb package with Ubuntu 12.04) without any problem.

If you want to preview or capture video, now mtvcgui and the EasyCAP DC60 work together without any adaptations,
but if you want to capture audio as well as video with the EasyCAP, you need to do the following:

On the second tab, check the "Capture audio using ALSA" checkbox,

then type in "hw.1" as ALSA device (if the EasyCAP is the second soundcard on your system).

Into the "Extra tv parameters" field type in:

amode=1:forceaudio:immediatemode=0

else the audio stream won't be captured (and you won't hear audio if you press the "Preview channel with mplayer" button on the first tab.

When I've done some more tests I will update the description concerning the usage of mtvcgui with the EasyCAP on the Recording page of this blog.

Andrew

Summary before summer - Part 1

Here is a summary of some news concerning the easycapdevice and about improvements of EasyCAP related software. 1'st part

•  New driver for Easycaps with somagic chip
  This page
  http://code.google.com/p/easycap-somagic-linux/wiki/GettingStarted
  is the light at the end of the tunnel for owners of any Somagic - EasyCAP who want to use it with Linux.
  
  When buying any EasyCAP on the Internet, people cannot figure out, what type of device they will get.
  (See the picture and the Devices page on this blog.)
  Let's hope that any time soon the Somagic EasyCAPs can be used with Linux as easy as the "real" DC60 devices at present .

 

• Changes to the easycapdriver
  When typing "easycap" into the search field of the gitweb summary of the latest mainline kernel (3.5 -rc2) on kernel.org,
  http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git;a=summary
  the output shows that some people were recently working on the driver.
  Although I cannot interpret the effects of these changes in detail, I think that the driver will become still more stable in future kernel releases.
  
  
• Minimal system requirements for the EasyCAP
  Piotr from Poland mailed me his success story with his EasyCAP 002 and Zoneminder.
  His system data:
  
  Celeron 533 MHz, 320MB RAM, Debian Wheezy (alpha) !