Well, I spent most of the night testing the new mplayer pvr support. I ran into problems, and had to reboot more than a few times when the card would lock up. It has it’s share of bugs, but it is possible to watch or record TV on both tuners at the same time.
The cool thing is that I can record straight to a DVD MPEG2 and then create a DVD with dvdauthor, and it will work in my settop player. I’m stlil having problems with the audio making odd noises on a certain pitch level, but at least now I’m sure it’s not a mythtv problem. The odd part is I can’t hear it on my computer except sometimes, so it might just be I need to tweak my audio settings somewhere. Who knows.
For the record, here’s the mencoder profile I’m using:
[ivtv]
tv=normid=10:device=/dev/video0:width=720:height=480
pvr=abitrate=192:vbitrate=2200000:vpeak=2600000:fmt=dvd:aspect=1
of=mpeg=1
mpegopts=format=dvd
ovc=copy=1
ofps=30000/1001
oac=copy=1
I set the audio and video bitrates to much lower than they can go (192 kbps for audio, and between 2200 to 2600 kbps for video) just because that’s good enough for me. Then I copy the audio and video directly straight into an MPEG container. Playing it back always results in a broken frame on the end right now, and on my DVD player it will just stop when it reaches the end. Also, it doesn’t look like the aspect ratio is getting written correctly unless I add “aspect=1”, which is the default setting anyway. If I don’t add that, dvdauthor complains about its value.
So, if you’re wondering if you want to try to set yours up, I would recommend against it. I’m running development versions of mplayer and ivtv, and even then things are very finicky. I’m pretty excited to see how things turn out, and I’m quite impressed that everything works as well as it does right now. It’s definately a project to keep my eye on.