Mplayer on Michael’s Domain

Pinnacle PCTV Deluxe and Linux support

Thu, 05 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I bought a USB TV card; a Pinnacle PCTV Deluxe. There is only one program for Linux available: dunerec . Here is how I got it working: Download and untar (tar -xvzf) dune2-linux.tar.gz After untarring you have two directories: dunetools and dunelib, two shell scripts (which function escapes me) and one README.txt with some installation instructions. You don’t need to compile anything, you just need to copy the executables (and some other files) into the correct directories: dunetools/dunerec/dunerec goes to /usr/local/bin dunetools/duneinit/duneinit goes to /usr/local/bin You need to create the directory /usr/local/lib/dune Now you need some files from the Windows program, that came together with the TV card. Obviously you need to have a Windows system and install the Program there first. You find the files yu need in “C:\Program Files\Pinnacle\Pinnacle PCTV Deluxe\Driver". You need to copy the files ending with .v (k2.v, etc.), DuneNTSC.sys and DunePal.sys to the newly created directory /usr/local/lib/dune As I am living in Europe, I need to use Pal.sys; therefore I rename it to dune.sys chown root /usr/local/bin/dunerec chmod u+s /usr/local/bin/dunerec chown root /usr/local/bin/duneinit chmod u+s /usr/local/bin/duneinit Scanning for channels is done with the command /usr/local/bin dunerec -i 0 -S 1 -d 1 Dune at 001/002 VID 2304 PID 061E Loading ezusb2 firmware… dune.sys: FWOff: 77736 FWLen: 10296 You have to restart the program! The “-d 1” option is only to print debugging information. You need to execute the command again, this is normal: dunerec -i 0 -S 1 >> /usr/local/lib/dune/channels.txt This command puts the output of the scanning into the file /usr/local/lib/dune/channels.txt; you still have to remove from this file the lines starting with . The error message “Cannot find dune!” occurs when the TV card is not plugged into the computer. I had it also occur when the TV card was present and I needed to remove the card, restart and hotplug it again to make it working. You should test whether the card is working: dunerec -R test.mpg -i 0 -a 479250 This records the TV signal on frequency 479.250 MHz into the file test.mpg. You can stop the recording with Ctrl-C and watch this mpg file with the video player of your choice. However, in order to watch live streaming TV, you need to pipe the data to a player. The only player I managed to get accepting the data is mplayer . There is a great rpm for Suse Linux 9.1 from Packman . Don’t forget to download the rpm with all the codecs! Here are some commands that I have used for piping: dunerec -R - -i 0 -a 479250 | mplayer -cache 8192 - You can adjust the cache size to reduce the waiting time to start playback. dunerec -R - -i 0 -a 479250 | mplayer -framedrop -vo x11 - Without cache you need to allow the player to drop frames. dunerec -i 0 -a 479250 -t dvd -R - | mplayer -ao arts -vo xv -double -cache 4096 -framedrop - This is the complete command that I use now. I copied it from the gtk2 GUI.GTK2 GUI for TV card “Pinnacle PCTV Deluxe” http://pctvgtk.sourceforge.net” . The installation work according to the instructions and the stuff really works. I had some problems with the scanning. it didn’t find all programs. I had to do the scanning under Windows (using the Pinnacle program) and then write down the frequencies and add them manually to the channels.txt files. But that went also without problems.

ksubtile, subtitles and subtitle format (srt, mplayer)

Wed, 04 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

There are heaps of subtitle editors for Windows, but I found only one usable for Linux: ksubtile. It’s not perfect but usable. It uses SubRip format (*.SRT). In these files subtitles have a running number, end- and startime down to milliseconds given for each subtitle.

Mplayer is probably the best video player (and mencoder the best encoder)

Wed, 04 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Because the videodata recorded by dunerec is in some strange mpeg flavour it occupied quite a bit of diskspace. 2 hours approximately 5 GB. that is why I was looking for an easy way to convert the mpeg into divx. After unsuccessfully palying with transcode, I managed with mencoder. Mencoder is included with Mplayer and there is an RPM for Suse Linux 9.1.

Installing mplayer on kubuntu

Thu, 29 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

edit /etc/apt/sources.list and uncomment the lines for universe (remove the "" in front of the lines)
add a line similar to universe see the example: http://fi.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu breezy multiverse
download any extra codecs: wget http://www2.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/codecs/all-20050412.tar.bz2
unpack the codecs: tar -xvjf all-20050412.tar.bz2
create the directory for the codecs: mkdir /usr/lib/win32
move the “codecs” to the new directory: mv all-20050412/* /usr/lib/win32
install mplayer: apt-get install mplayer-586
install mplayer fonts: apt-get install mplayer-fonts

Watching, ripping and converting DVDs (xine, mplayer, mencoder, dvd, iso image)

Sun, 12 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Both xine and MPlayer can play DVDs directly, but xine has a DVD navigation. In Mplayer you need to specify which movie (VOB file) you want to play:xine dvd:// mplayer dvd://3 If you just want to temporarily store the DVD on your hard disk it might be sufficient to create a DVD image:dd if=/dev/dvd of=rosenstrasse.iso The image can be mounted as follows:sudo mount -o loop rosenstrasse.iso /media/temp/ Xine can play a DVD from an iso image directly (without mouting the image):xine dvd://media/isos/movie.iso Note that you need to specify always the complete path even if the movie is in the current directory! Mplayer can play the individual VOB files from the image (however without subtitle support). I couldn’t make Mplayer to accept the iso image as dvd.For conversion to e.g. DivX/XviD the easiest is to use Mplayer/mencoder. First I extracted audio:mencoder dvd://1 -ovc frameno -o frameno.avi -oac mp3lame -lameopts abr:br=128 Then the 1. pass encoding:mencoder dvd://1 -nosound -oac copy -o /dev/null -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=800:vhq:vpass=1:vqmin=1:vqmax=31 -vop scale -zoom -xy 640 -vf pp lb Then the 2. pass encoding:mencoder dvd://1 -oac copy -o file.avi -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=800:vhq:vpass=2:vqmin=1:vqmax=31 -vop scale -zoom -xy 640 -vf pp lbIt is more difficult to extract the subtitles. You can either extract them as images (easier but bigger filesize) or then convert these images into textfiles (requires an OCR step).Extract subtitle images (from mounted iso image in this case):cat /media/temp/VIDEO_TS/VTS_01_?.VOB | tcextract -x ps1 -t vob -a 0x20 > movie.ps1 Convert subtitle images:subtitle2vobsub -i /media/temp/VIDEO_TS/VTS_01_0.IFO -p movie.ps1 -o movie_name Copy metadata:cp /media/temp/VIDEO_TS/VTS_01_0.IFO movie_name.ifo Play from VOB file directly:mplayer /media/temp/VIDEO_TS/VTS_01_1.VOB -vobsub movie_name -vobsubid 0 Play from avi file:mplayer movie.avi -vobsub movie_name -vobsubid 0