Talk:Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-950Q: Difference between revisions

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=User Expereince=
=User Experience=
== Overal Impression ==
== Overal Impression ==


This is my first video capture device and I really like it. It currently works great/excellent for ATSC (digital broadcast) but, at the time of writting, it doesn't work at all for NTSC (analog TV/cable). <s>There is a patch[http://lists-archives.org/video4linux/20859-xc5000-tuner-analog-support.html] already available that fixes this problem, but I haven't tried it.</s> (Note: that patch added analog support for that particular tuner IC, but it does NOT add support for this device. See article for details). I use WinTV-HVR-950Q on very modest hardware: an old Dell Latitude D600 laptop with 2GHz/500MB connected to a 1080p LCD TV through a VGA cable. Both my TV and the WinTV are connected to an internal amplified antenna (TERK HDTVa).
This is my first video capture device and I really like it. It currently works great/excellent for ATSC (digital broadcast) but not so well for NTSC (analog TV/cable). I use WinTV-HVR-950Q on very modest hardware: on an old Dell Latitude D600 laptop with 2GHz/500MB connected to a 1080p LCD TV through a VGA cable. Both my TV and the WinTV are connected to an internal amplified antenna (TERK HDTVa). I have connected my satelite tv box to the composite input of WinTV, so that I can get HDTV and satelite TV at the same time without an external switch.
This WinTV tuner is as good as my TV tuner: both found the same channels and have about the same video quality (even for 1080i broadcasts). (Note: the device has no impact upon digital video quality -- this dependent upon other factors like video decoder, rendering method, video drivers etc)
This WinTV tuner is as good as my TV tuner: both found the same channels and have about the same video quality (even for 1080i broadcasts). (Note: the device has no impact upon digital video quality -- this dependent upon other factors like video decoder, rendering method, video drivers etc)


Note that it's critical to have a fast video card. My card, ATI Radeon 9000 32Mb, is not supported by ATI anymore, so I had to use the open source radeon driver instead of ATI's fglrx. If you use the default settings for the radeon driver, you will get a pitiful 170FPS in glxgears, which is ''NOT'' sufficient for watching digital TV. But after I used this xorg.conf file[http://lambda.uta.edu/d600/xorg2.conf], I got about 1100FPS, which was sufficient. Of course, I had to do the following to get the best resolution on my TV (and a blank screen on my laptop):
Note that it's crucial to have a fast video card. My card, ATI Radeon 9000 32Mb, is not supported by ATI anymore, so I had to use the open source radeon driver instead of ATI's fglrx. If you use the default settings for the radeon driver, you will get a pitiful 170FPS in glxgears, which is ''NOT'' sufficient for watching digital TV. But after I used this xorg.conf file[http://lambda.uta.edu/d600/xorg2.conf], I got about 1100FPS, which was sufficient. Of course, I had to do the following to get the best resolution on my TV (and a blank screen on my laptop):
<pre>
<pre>
xrandr --output LVDS --off --output VGA-0 --mode 1920x1080
xrandr --output LVDS --off --output VGA-0 --mode 1920x1080
Line 30: Line 30:
because of my slow video and audio cards.
because of my slow video and audio cards.


To watch an analog NTSC channel (US broadcast) without sound, say channel 3, use
== TV Recording ==

Instead of using special software for TIVO-like recording (such as MythTV), I use simple scripts. I first created a file in my bin directory, called favorites.txt, with mnemonics for my favorite channels listed in channels.conf (these are actual their channel numbers). Example:
<pre>
<pre>
mplayer tv://3
4 KDFW DT
5 KXAS-HD
11 KTVT-DT
13 KERA-HD
</pre>
</pre>
You can also capture video from the composite or the S-video input. Simply use <tt>mplayer tv:///1</tt> for composite or <tt>mplayer tv:///2</tt> for S-video. They give far better image than the antenna input. I used the directions on the mplayer page [http://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/MPlayer] to get sound for analog channels, but the sound is not synchronized with the video.
and use the following script, called tape, in my bin directory:
<pre>
#!/bin/sh
ext=`date +'%m-%d-%H-%M-%S'`
tapeit='/tmp/tapeit-'${ext}
stopit='/tmp/stopit'
file='~/Videos/'${ext}'-'$1
pat='s/^'$1' //p;d'
chan=`sed "${pat}" ~/bin/favorites.txt`
if [ "${chan}" == "" ]; then echo "Valid channels:"; cat ~/bin/favorites.txt; exit; fi
echo "azap -r -c ~/channels.conf '${chan}' > /dev/null & cat /dev/dvb/adapter0/dvr0 > ${file}" > ${tapeit}
echo 'killall -q azap cat' > ${stopit}
if [ "$2" = "now" ]; then sh ${tapeit}; else at -f ${tapeit} $2; fi
if [ -z "$3" ]; then at -f ${stopit} now + 1 hour; else at -f ${stopit} $3; fi
</pre>
For example, to tape something on KDFW-DT (channel 4) between 5pm and 6pm you execute:
<pre>
tape 4 5pm 6pm
</pre>
(note that for a 1080i channel, you will need 6GB/hour disk space). The result will be written in the directory Video under a name that contains date/time/channel. Then you can use mplayer to watch this file.

Revision as of 20:58, 30 March 2009

User Experience

Overal Impression

This is my first video capture device and I really like it. It currently works great/excellent for ATSC (digital broadcast) but not so well for NTSC (analog TV/cable). I use WinTV-HVR-950Q on very modest hardware: on an old Dell Latitude D600 laptop with 2GHz/500MB connected to a 1080p LCD TV through a VGA cable. Both my TV and the WinTV are connected to an internal amplified antenna (TERK HDTVa). I have connected my satelite tv box to the composite input of WinTV, so that I can get HDTV and satelite TV at the same time without an external switch. This WinTV tuner is as good as my TV tuner: both found the same channels and have about the same video quality (even for 1080i broadcasts). (Note: the device has no impact upon digital video quality -- this dependent upon other factors like video decoder, rendering method, video drivers etc)

Note that it's crucial to have a fast video card. My card, ATI Radeon 9000 32Mb, is not supported by ATI anymore, so I had to use the open source radeon driver instead of ATI's fglrx. If you use the default settings for the radeon driver, you will get a pitiful 170FPS in glxgears, which is NOT sufficient for watching digital TV. But after I used this xorg.conf file[1], I got about 1100FPS, which was sufficient. Of course, I had to do the following to get the best resolution on my TV (and a blank screen on my laptop): 

xrandr --output LVDS --off --output VGA-0 --mode 1920x1080

Basic Installation

Connect the WinTV to a good antenna. Then download some tools (using your distribution installer: yum, apt-get, etc): 

yum install dvb-apps mplayer

Then scan your ATSC channels. For example, to scan ATSC channels in US do 

scandvb /usr/share/dvb-apps/atsc/us-ATSC-center-frequencies-8VSB > channels.conf

Then copy the file channels.conf to the directory .mplayer/ and test it on of one of the channels listed in channels.conf. For example, if you have a channel called KERA-HD, you do: 

mplayer dvb://'KERA-HD'

In my case, for a 1080i broadcast, I had to use the following parameters: 

mplayer dvb://'KERA-HD' -vo x11 -framedrop 1

because of my slow video and audio cards.

To watch an analog NTSC channel (US broadcast) without sound, say channel 3, use 

mplayer tv://3

You can also capture video from the composite or the S-video input. Simply use mplayer tv:///1 for composite or mplayer tv:///2 for S-video. They give far better image than the antenna input. I used the directions on the mplayer page [2] to get sound for analog channels, but the sound is not synchronized with the video.

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