[plug] Fwd: VHS tape conversion - input not working

[Gavin Chester]

Hi again,

I hope no one broke any sweat over this issue - and from the lack of
response probably not.

I've not so much as solved the puzzling, but challenging, linux issue as
have stumbled across a colleague with a simple appliance that does the
job at no cost to me (I imagined paying some bureau to do the task). It
takes VHS tapes and automatically rips, encodes and burns to a DVD in
one easy step!

Oh well, my software machinations were fun while they lasted!

Gavin.

-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: VHS tape conversion - input not working
Date: Tue, 27 Jan 2015 17:43:22 +0800
From: Gavin Chester <gavin.chester at gmail.com>
To: plug at plug.org.au

Hi folks,

Long time for me since writing, and I think me that reflects how
successful linux has become. By choosing one of the myriad distros,
linux is almost like an appliance these days and virtually everything
"just works" ... mostly.

Now here's my first problem in years, and because linux is so good now
I'm somewhat out of practice in solving these things. This is the prob:
I've finally got around to dabbling with an external USB VHS video
analogue-to-digital capture device that I bought about a decade ago! Its
the "KWorld VS-USB2800D". Not a highly regarded piece of kit, but there
you go. It takes VHS input and outputs video to USB with a separate
audio jack to go into you mic input.

Using composite output I can get a picture on my laptop with TVtime -
and only TVtime. It just happened automagically. OTOH, xawtv, mplayer,
and vlc don't see it at all when trying all the obvious changes to input
settings (eg, setting capture device /dev/video1 in vlc does nothing,
whereas xawtv only sees /dev/video0, which turns on the laptop webcam).

It is being allocated /dev/video1 (because of the aforesaid webcam). I
checked and added myself to the "video" user group in the thought that
it might be a permissions thing.

(eg, $ ls -l /dev/video1 > crw-rw----+ 1 root video 81, 1 Jan 27 17:07
/dev/video1)

 I also uncommented the lines in /etc/sane.d/v4l.conf to activate
/dev/video0 and /dev/video1 as per file contents:
-------------------
# In order to use the v4linux backend you have to give the device
# You can enable multiple lines if
# you really have multible v4l devices.

# Backends disabled, to re-enable unquote the following lines
# See https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/sane-backends/+bug/87312
#/dev/bttv0
/dev/video0
/dev/video1
#/dev/video2
#/dev/video3)

To verify the device here is the output of lsusb:
"Bus 002 Device 004: ID eb1a:2820 eMPIA Technology, Inc. "


dmesg output:
------------
2203.452628] usb 2-1.2: new high-speed USB device number 4 using ehci-pci
[ 2203.545200] usb 2-1.2: New USB device found, idVendor=eb1a,
idProduct=2820
[ 2203.545212] usb 2-1.2: New USB device strings: Mfr=0, Product=0,
SerialNumber=0
[ 2203.545630] em28xx: New device   @ 480 Mbps (eb1a:2820, interface 0,
class 0)
[ 2203.545636] em28xx: Video interface 0 found: bulk isoc
[ 2203.545807] em28xx: chip ID is em2820
[ 2203.637217] em2820 #0: board has no eeprom
[ 2203.696858] em2820 #0: No sensor detected
[ 2203.711170] em2820 #0: found i2c device @ 0x4a on bus 0 [saa7113h]
[ 2203.744676] em2820 #0: Your board has no unique USB ID.
[ 2203.744687] em2820 #0: A hint were successfully done, based on i2c
devicelist hash.
[ 2203.744691] em2820 #0: This method is not 100% failproof.
[ 2203.744695] em2820 #0: If the board were missdetected, please email
this log to:
[ 2203.744698] em2820 #0:       V4L Mailing List
<linux-media at vger.kernel.org>
[ 2203.744702] em2820 #0: Board detected as EM2860/SAA711X Reference Design
[ 2203.824789] em2820 #0: Identified as EM2860/SAA711X Reference Design
(card=19)
[ 2204.245663] saa7115 7-0025: saa7113 found @ 0x4a (em2820 #0)
[ 2205.013872] em2820 #0: Config register raw data: 0x00
[ 2205.074007] em2820 #0: v4l2 driver version 0.2.0
[ 2205.602498] em2820 #0: V4L2 video device registered as video1
[ 2205.602510] em2820 #0: analog set to isoc mode.
[ 2205.602601] em2820 #0: Registering snapshot button...
[ 2205.602641] input: em28xx snapshot button as
/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.0/usb2/2-1/2-1.2/input/input15
[ 2205.602731] em2820 #0: Remote control support is not available for
this card.
------------------------

At this stage I'm stumped. My goal is to get the video to play in
something like vlc so I can record it to digital. The next goal will be
trying to suss out why the audio is not working, though I've never used
the mic input on this laptop so don't know yet if that's an input
setting.

All suggestions gratefully received.

-- 
Gavin Chester
Pinjarra, Western Australia
email: gavin.chester at gmail.com