Hi - been using Kdenlive for a year or 2 now, pretty basic use with a Firewire camcorder - works great.

I'm looking to convert some of my priceless (well to me anyway) home videos from VHS to DVD, with a USB Empia 2861 stick, but I'm struggling.

Under the kdenlive configuration option the device is detected as an EM2860/SAA711X Reference design. So far so good. However, when I try to work with it (as a test I have connected my camcorder to it) with the record monitor I am simply presented with the message "not connected".

I was aware that the card was sold as a "windows only" card.

Here is the output of lsusb

ian@ian-MXC051:~$ lsusb
Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 001 Device 003: ID eb1a:2861 eMPIA Technology, Inc.
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub

A verbose listing spills out a whole lot of data about the card, so I am assuming it has been correctly identified and is properly installed. There is also a green light on the stick. With VLC I am able to make that light up if I treat it as a PVR capture device. VLC appears to be acting as if it is capturing but all I get is a huge file with nothing on it.

Anyone have any thoughts about this one please?

Thanks

Ian

Which Kdenlive / MLT version are you using?

If you have MLT >= 0.7, you can do the following:

Check that your device is recognised (in a terminal):

ls -la /dev/video*

You should see:

/dev/video0

If you don't have that, you have a driver issue and I cannot help.

If a device is listed, like video0, you can try the following (in a terminal):

melt video4linux2:/dev/video0

It will try to capture in a PAL format (720x576 25fps) and display the video. If your capture card does not output PAL video, you will need to create a profile for it, like those found in /usr/share/mlt/profiles with the correct settings (frame rate, size, ...) and then do:

melt -profile /path/to/my/profile video4linux2:/dev/video0

If one of these work, you will have capture working in the next Kdenlive version that will be released in a few weeks - you can also try the development version from sunab PPA if you are using Ubuntu:
https://launchpad.net/~sunab/+archive/kdenlive-svn

capture with my webcam work well, but I have only the sound why???????????????????????

Thanks

ls -la /dev/video*

You should see:

/dev/video0

>>>>>That's what I get

melt video4linux2:/dev/video0

>>>>>I get a long list of options but at the beginning I get

cannot load video4linux2

I wonder whether there is a V4L component missing

Edit: I forgot to answer your other point - I'm using kdenlive 0.8 (at least I think that's the one (I'm not at my Linux PC right now).

Anyone with any idea how to fix this please?

To update

I have the card working under VLC I am able to see and hear the footage (have to by-pass the card for audio though but that is no big deal). What I needed to do was to figure out how to tell VLC to expect Composite video (it was video option 1).

The VLC "convert" options don't work well for me. VLCs default option (avi) produces huge files (30Gb for 25 minutes of footage) and they always appear to be broken. I want to give Kdenlive another go and this time I don't get any error messages when I try to record. However, the preview screen remains black and when I test the resulting file it is audio only. I suspect this may be due to a difference between the video type put out by the card and what Kdenlive expects. Is there a way I can tell kdenlive what type of video to expect within the V4L settings? There is nothing immediately apparent so any help will be very welcome.

When I run the melt command it fails to load /dev/video0 as shown in the attached text file.

However, when I run the Kdenlive config wizard the card is auto-detected as in the attached screenshot. If I press play or record with the card attached to a source it responds - the stream light comes on - there's just nothing in the screen. If it helps it opens as a white screen and then turns to black. If in that state I remove the source from the card there is momentary interference on the screen. Do you think this is a configuration issue or is the text file saying I haven't a prayer - in which case I'll have to go on the dark side I think.

Update:

I attached an S Video cable to the card which appears to be option 0 for V4l i.e the default.

The effect was quite dramatic. The card detected by VLC and the video shown without any configuration at all, although the previous issues are still there.

With kdenlive it appears that if I ensure that the project resolution matches the card and I change /dev/video0 to ///dev/video0 On pressing play the footage appears in the window. However, pressing record either freezes the footage in the pane, or the word INVALID appears in it. The resulting output just contains audio.

Are there hidden recording settings that I can change? It seems to me that if I can see the footage in the window I am close to solving this.

Never mind, I have sorted it

Hello,
could you share how have you coped with this source changing? Couse I'm struggling with it for about month. I've tried several apps too, and VLC is only option so far for me...
Thanks for any advice.

As of now whilst I can see the video in the project pane whilst the source is playing it, the moment I hit record the pane goes blank and the recorded video footage is a black screen with the word "INVALID" across it. I have no idea what this is but as I needed to get my project started (13 x 3hr VHS conversion to DVD) I figured out that VLC recorded the footage fine. The files were huge and because I wanted to keep copies of the footage in addition to the DVDs I needed to convert them to MPEGs. I have found that Kdenlive allows me to import the clip and I can then render it in the required format.

Just a pity kdenlive can't do the whole job for me.

The issue has been solved - well sort of. I say this because whilst I can now get it working, the capture and conversion to mpeg on the fly appears to be well above the capabilities of my computer - a humble Dell centrino laptop. Time for a change maybe although it works fine with my DV camcorder and has the precious firewire port.

I will stick with VLC for streaming and kdenlive for editing and then converting the files. However, for the benefit of anyone else struggling to make this work the answer appears to be to launch kdenlive with the following command:


LD_PRELOAD="/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l2convert.so" kdenlive

The info was obtained here

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1092701

Whilst it doesn't directly help me at this point, I hope someone else may benefit from this.