[pvrusb2] Preventing drop-outs while capturing video?

[Andrew Munkres]

On Fri, 4 Mar 2011, akp2akp2 wrote:

> Just curious, isn't the cache ("-cache 20480" for 20MB buffer) option of
> mencoder enough to get the same result?

Maybe that would work -- however, not just using "-cache 20480", but also 
writing the output to a named pipe ("-o fifo"), and using a separate 
process (like "cat fifo > output.avi") to write the video to disk. (Is 
mencoder single-threaded? If so, it may block when it writes to disk, 
which might prevent it from reading from /dev/video0 often enough.)

(With the PVR USB2 device, it's not really necessary to pass the stream 
through mencoder's demuxer / muxer, since it's already in an MPEG2 
container when it's read from /dev/video0. In my case, I was planning to 
transcode to lower-bitrate VP8, and libvpx didn't seem to be fast enough 
to do that in real-time, so I couldn't transcode from /dev/video0 
directly.)