[mythtv-users] What is necessary for a capture card to be supported in MythTV?

Jonathan Larson jtlarson at u.washington.edu
Tue Oct 30 18:26:35 UTC 2012


For years I've been using 10 PVR-150 tuners spread across 4 SBEs to capture composite video/audio for classroom recordings, but those systems are about 5 years old now and I'm not sure how much longer they will be operating.

Since I'm not capturing digital cable/satellite, most of the capture cards used/tested with MythTV won't work for my application, so I'm looking to the security industry for capture cards that better fit my needs for multiple composite+mono audio inputs in a single card. But since these cards aren't normally used with Mythtv, I'm not sure what would be necessary to make one work.

So here are the points that I'm not quite clear on:

1.What standards (V4L2?, ALSA?) does a capture card driver need to support to be recognized/controlled by mythtv?
2. Beyond the driver support, does MythTV need to be programmed to support a particular card input/output format combo-e.g. composite+mono input-->h.264 encoded output?

I'm thinking of this model specifically:  http://store.bluecherry.net/bluecherry-bc-h04120a-4-port-video-4-port-audio-h.264-pcie-hardware-compression-capture-card.html
These are the relevant specs from the product page:

Hardware compression H.264 capture card
4 port video inputs, 1 port video output
4 port audio inputs, 1 port audio output
120FPS recording @ 352x240, 120FPS @ 704x480
New! PCIe design

The Bluecherry BC-H04120A is true hardware compression card supported by our Video4Linux(2) driver.  Recently tests with this driver has shown siginificant CPU / memory saving over standard software compression cards.

This card has several features not commonly found on traditional Linux supported MPEG-4 encoders, including:
Each port has a MJPEG and H.264 encoder, each can be opened separately.
Each device shows up as a Video4Linux(2) device and you have access to each encoder using standard Video4Linux APIs.
Each port is loaded up as an ALSA sound device, allowing for encoding G.723 audio from each audio input.
The driver exposes the video output as a 'display' device, allowing you to control the video output (specify which inputs are displayed on the composite output)

Any help/advice the MythTV community could provide would be appreciated.

Jon
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