[pvrusb2] Frame grab / stills capture ?

[Mike Isely]

On Mon, 11 Feb 2008, pvrusb2 at netspoon.co.uk wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> Somewhere back in the mail list I noticed a posting suggesting frame 
> grabbing / stills capture might be possible with the hardware, perhaps 
> awaiting the driver feature to make this possible?
> 
> I realize features equate to development time, and this device is most 
> likely chosen for it's mpeg2 streaming, but would frame capture to jpeg 
> be possible directly from the device?
> 

I interpret this to mean you're looking for a way to grab raw video 
frames (as opposed to mpeg data).  If that's the case then I can tell 
you that the hardware is theoretically capable of it, but the pvrusb2 
driver doesn't currently support this at all.  There are some things I 
can chase to figure this out (including the bit that Mike Krufky 
mentioned in another reply), however I just haven't had a chance to 
seriously look at it.  The reality is basically that people who use this 
device want it for the hardware mpeg encoder - if one were instead 
looking for simple frame buffer capture, there are other (cheaper) 
devices which have support for that in Linux.

With that said, I suppose there's no reason why one couldn't just use 
some kind of utility to grab snapshots right out of the mpeg stream.  I 
haven't tried anything like this, but surely there's a utility floating 
around to do that.

  -Mike


-- 

Mike Isely
isely @ pobox (dot) com
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