I have a nice and shiny new TV card, it has support on Linux out of the box, I can use tvtime to watch TV, but that's just about it. For the last two days I've been busy to make a proper mencoder command for recording TV / analog video with very fine tuned parameters. All fine and good, but how on Earth am I supposed to preview what's recorded?
I get no visual output, mencoder does its thing and once hitting Ctrl-C all is done. Well, all except the fact that I don't even know what was recorded
There is one possibility, which is to run mencoder and then after 10 seconds or so, run mplayer to watch the video generated by mencoder. The problem with this setup is the fact that I get to see what's going on 10 seconds later, and it also makes managing the recording process harder. On top of this it just adds to the complexity of a simple procedure, with no real satisfactory result.
Rather than reading the video device in full duplex mode, why can't one application open it in "recording" mode and the other in "playback" mode? I know that the same is possible with audio devices, so why make video capture so utterly complex?!
I basically use my computer display as a TV, so usually I just watch TV, but I would really love to be able to simply push a button and have the application record what I see. It is frustrating because I think computers of this century should be able to do this kind of thing. Oh wait, it *is* possible. I've done it on Windows with Pinnacle software, so what's f**king wrong with Linux?!?!?!?!!?!
Someone help me out
[/rant]
