VLC HowTo/Use a capture card

This page describes how to use video from a TV or Video card.

Other "how to" pages

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The following describes how to watch TV with your DVB-Card

(tested with DVB-T and the Windows-Version of VLC)

• find out the frequencies of your location
• go to File/Open CaptureCard
• choose DVB DirectShow
• check your kind of card (DVB-S -C -T)
• choose first frequency and bandwidth
• click on play

If your stream has "multiple" (for instance multiple sub channels, or you want to programmatically select a particular audio stream):

• when the channel plays, select playlist
• rightclick on the item, which is playing and select information
• go to stream
• here you can find all broadcast-channels with their service-ID
• write them down
• go to File/Open CaptureCard
• in the option-line at the bottom append a space (if not there) a : and the keyword "program=", followed by one of the service-IDs
• it should look like: ...300ms :program=16214
• click on play
• that's your channel
• now you can rename this playing item of the playlist to your station-name
• and the same with the next service-ID
• and so on with the next frequency

Don't forget to save your playlist!

Have fun!

Spielmops

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The minimal command to transcode from a capture card to a portable MPEG file (this example includes trancoding which may be lessly, be careful) is thus:

vlc v4l:// :v4l-norm=1: '--sout=#transcode{vcodec=mp1v,vb=2030,audio-sync,acodec=mpga,ab=192,channels=2}:std{access=file,mux=mpeg1,url="out_file.mpg"}'

These MPEG files have been verified to work with:

• Windows Media Player 10
• Apple QuickTime Player 7
• XINE 1.0
• ffplay
• xanim 2.80 (no audio)