[ivtv-users] 48 evenly spaced vertical lines in captured video [solved]

[bjc]

On Wed, 2008-09-10 at 12:41 -0400, bjc wrote: 
> To convert Sony Handycam video 8 tapes from analog to digital, I got a
> Hauppauge WinTV PVR-150 card for my amd64 type computer running Debian
> Testing.
> 
> My installation almost works, except that the digital images contain
> approximately 48 heavy, evenly spaced vertical lines, that are not on
> the original tapes. To reproduce this I use Xawtv to set the video
> source to Composite-1 then run cat /dev/video0 | xine URL:stdin://mpeg4
> & in a terminal. The video is displayed on the monitor.
> 
> The TV card seems to be OK, since if I capture from a TV station in the
> same way, setting the video source to Tuner-1, I don't get the lines.
> That is as long as I test the tuner-1 video source right after starting
> the computer. If I have already used the Composite-1 source and I switch
> to Tuner-1, the TV images then also have the lines. I need to reboot to
> get rid of them from the tuner signal.

Over the weekend I found out the following about the problem I described
in my earlier message;

1. The problem of the 48 heavy lines happens, for reasons I don't
understand, when I use Xawtv (version 3.95.dfsg.1-8 installed from the
debian testing repository) to set the video source to composite 1. If
instead I use $ v4l2-ctl to do that, I don't get the problem. I can
switch back and forth between tuner and composite video input and both
continue to give images without the vertical lines.

2. Installation of ivtv was a lot simpler than I realized with my 2.6.25
kernel.  I only needed two things; to install a package available on my
debian testing repository called; ivtv-utilities and to download the
firmware. 

3. From
http://dl.ivtvdriver.org/ivtv/firmware/ I downloaded the file
ivtv-firmware.tar.gz. "This file
is meant for ivtv-0.4.2 and up and always contains the recommended
firmware versions." I moved this file to /usr/lib/hotplug/firmware and
extracted it there.

Thanks