January 29th 2009 - Pinnacle PCTV Pro USB

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hi

Today I bought a Pinnacle PCTV Pro USB TV Capture Card to capture the output of the game consoles, since it has 3 inputs (Antenna, Composite and S-Video) 3 gameconsoles may fit into it :)

There is an issue with the audio, I'm working with 'tvtime' to see the TV

At the beginning by running the following

• $ tvtime --device /dev/video0 --vbidevice /dev/vbi0 --input 0

I can watch TV but no luck with the audio, until I found these two sites which list similar problems and they solve it by running sox - the swiss army knife in audio tools.

The problem basically is the capture card comes with a sound card and the audio from the TV channels is dumped into this new card, since I'm using my primary card I expected all audio went through it, but it ressult it wasn't, so I had to use sox to have a "digital wire" (formally a pipe) connecting the output from the usb audio card with the input of the primary audio card.

the sox usage info was obtained from the following sources

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=622583
http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/debian-ubuntu-linux-configure-pinnacle-pctv-tuner.html

My command to load tvtime and pipe te audio to the correct card is:

• $ tvtime --device /dev/video0 --vbidevice /dev/vbi0 --input 0 & sleep 1 && sox --channels 2 -sw --rate 44200 --type ossdsp /dev/dsp1 --type ossdsp /dev/dsp

• Load tvtime and sleep 1 second, after sleeping (double ampersand) launch sox

So far I have only seen the signal with audio comming from antenna input, even if I connect the RCA audio to the device via RCA-to-3.5mmPlug adapter doesn't make any difference, the sound input is grabbed from the last tunned channel on Antenna input.

I hope to get the audio working from Composite or S-Video input, else I'm just bypassing the sox part

I believe that's all for now

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