Hi there, I put a How-to together that may be of use to others and I would like to share it. If you have a Hauppauge wintv, this is for you, but sure it will work with other cards too.

Linux TV Guide

Hi.

Excellent. I've always had trouble recording live TV without dropping frames all over the place. This seems to work very well.

Here's the command I used, after playing with it for a bit:

mencoder -tv driver=v4l2:norm=PAL:input=0:width=352:height=288 -of avi -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vhq:vbitrate=6000 -ofps 25.000000 -oac copy -o record.avi tv://

A couple of notes:
1) Without having 'driver=v4l2', I got a blue screen (not the Windows BSOD kind, thankfully) when the .avi was played back, or an error from mencoder, depending on which channel I tried.
2) On my card (an _old_ PCI WinTV card, with no audio capture), the TV tuner is on 'input=0'.
3) For the sake of comparison, my Athlon 2500 could handle 352x288 resolution captures at a bitrate of 6000 quite comfortably (around 25% processor usage).

This is all on Fedora C.3, kernel 2.6.12.1 with mplayer compiled from CVS.

Hope that's of some use to your howto.

Cheers!

Dave

you might consider contributing it to Linuxquestions
as a tutorial
or at this site
http://www.howtoforge.com/
where it will get wider exposure

floppy

Glad it was helpfull ilikejam.
Thanks for you input too, much appreciated

Good idea floppy, I`ll submit it at http://www.howtoforge.com/