On Tue, 2006-05-16 at 13:57 -0700, Simon Baxter wrote: 
12:51:47 Switching to channel 1 on device 5
12:51:47 NEW Audio-PID=80, Video-PID=160
12:51:47 runEncoder(Apid=80, Vpid=160)
12:51:47 ffmpeg -f mpeg1video -s 352x288 -ad /dev/dsp:14 -ar 44.1 -vd 
/dev/video1 -ac 1 -b 2000 -ab 80 -y -re -title analogTV -author 
analogTV -copyright GPL -comment analogTV -aspect 4:3 -tvstd NTSC 
/tmp/.analogtv.avi &
12:51:47 nice() failed, 13:Permission denied
<snip>

I'm not sure where 'nice' is being called - and this error doesn't occur if 
run as 'root'.  Will have to see what I get, when I'm local to the machine 
again and can see the picture.  I still have problems - and a recording 
doesn't write any data to 001.vdr....but at least the plugin's doing 
something now.
This is where I left it and gave up.  Hopefully someone can solve this problem for you.   I didn't have the issue with the -hq switch.  I'm running this version of ffmpeg:
FFmpeg version CVS, Copyright (c) 2000-2004 Fabrice Bellard
  configuration:  --prefix=/usr --enable-gpl --enable-mp3lame --enable-libogg --enable-vorbis --enable-pp --enable-faac --enable-faad --enable-a52 --enable-xvid --enable-dts --enable-pp --enable-shared --enable-pthreads
  libavutil version: 49.0.0
  libavcodec version: 51.9.0
  libavformat version: 50.4.0
  built on May  7 2006 14:54:44, gcc: 4.0.3

Norm