[UbuntuDallas] Video issues

[Marc Randolph]

On Fri, Feb 5, 2010 at 8:58 PM, Juan Collao <collao at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> My name is Juan and I'm relatively new to Ubuntu. Although I have had some
> great results with Linux, I have also had my fair share of frustrations.
> Having said that, I'm not going back to WIndows. The main difficulty I've
> had with Linux is that I have not been able to get my video sources to work
> properly. Particularly, I have a Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-950 that used to work
> great with WIndows XP, but I have not been able to make it work with Linux.
> I have researched this issue to death with no positive results. I thought
> that http://linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/Hauppauge_WinTV-HVR-950 would have
> the answer, but no luck.
>
> I think that somehow Ubuntu has my video sources mixed up. When I tried to
> open XSane to scan an image, it would pick up the TV card, but when I went
> to Kaffeine to choose a TV card, I would see my scanner as the video source.
> Also, when I open Cheese Webcam, it my webcam doesn't work. Could it be that
> all of these are USB connections and Ubuntu doesn't detect them
> automatically? Any ideas? I have been stuck with this for months now. I
> would greatly appreciate any help with this.

Howdy Juan,

The MythTV mailing lists and such seem to suggest that this device
should work.  That isn't to say that the kernel that you're running
might not have problems, just that the kernel should not be the
limitation for most versions (this is the first question I always
verify about hardware on Linux).

Are you trying to use analog or digital input?   If it is analog, this
device doesn't automatically encode it into mpeg, so you'd have to do
that process somewhere along the way, or make sure whatever software
you are trying to use supports frame grabbers.

If you're running digital, I believe you should be able to cat
/dev/<videodevice>    >   filename.mpg
and then play back that file with most any software.  If it is analog
I'm guessing that you'd need to feed that file to some encoding
software before most players would handle it.  But I'm really just
making some semi-educated guesses.

BTW, Brandon is correct... Ubuntu forums, and other places, would
probably be of much greater help than the Dallas mailing list.

Good luck, and please let me know what you end up discovering in the end!

   Marc