Finally got my recur up and running and I’ve been having a blast with it. Today I got out my old HD PVR that I’ve had stashed to try using it as a capture device.
Went in settings, enabled capture via USB, pressed the preview button and… It just seemed to crash the output. I had the chain as such PI Analog out → HDPVR, with the usb going back into the recur. The HDPVR has a passthru which was going back into my CRT.
When I press preview the output crashes seemingly, going to an image like the launch screen (red square, recur title), with text in the corner. I can’t remember what it said, something about restoring alsa session or something… I can find out later if this helps.
i did come across this which seems to imply that using the HDPVR to capture into the PI is very much possible but I’m pretty lost when it comes to anything lurking behind a frontend.
Anyone had any luck running this setup, or generally just have any idea how i should go about enabling a capture card that isnt plug and play?
interesting ! im not sure exactly why it would be crashing recur…
a good starting point for debugging this would be to try see if you can get video input from your capture device on the raspberry pi in general… (maybe some commandline or gui video players can do this ?)
if this works then the next step would be to see if it works running the default openframeworks capture example: if you are starting from recur image you should be able to find this somewhere around ~/openFrameworks/examples/Video/videoGrabberExample - you may need to modify this line to set the correct device (you will see it printed out in the logs)
otherwise recur should work with composite video input from easycap capture cards - like this and hdmi from capture cards like this both which are less than $10… so it could be easier to grab one of them rather than digging too deep into the weeds
oh hey dude. thanks for your time. recur is already proving to be a gamechanger for me!
i did grab myself a cheapo easycap that will come soon but i’m def gonna have a poke round and see if i can get ye olde PVR running
had little luck in getting things going, too far above my head really. do you have any recommendations for recur compatible capture cards that are a bit less lofi than the easycap?
When i tested recur OUTPUT to my laptop via easycap and then the pvr the quality difference was so night and day (both composite), pvr was looking pretty crisp and the easycap had a ton of bitrate artifacting particularly on dark images/black backgrounds
really a shame that pi sd hat you mentioned in documentation is impossible to obtain these days, it would be so perfect for avoiding the lottery that is usb sd capture cards
a long time ago i had an intensity shuttle (didnt work on rpi) and one other slightly more expensive than easycap capture - i think it was one of these - which did work and i think was slightly better quality… but not sure if worth the extra price… although im not really the best judge - i like how the easycaps look lol.
another option rather than taking chance on random captures would be to get one of the cheap usb-hdmi-capures i mentioned and then pair it with a good quality sd-to-hdmi upscaler (or whatever is within your budget) - that way you can also use the upscaler for other things besides caputure…
i thought blackmagic made analog-to-hdmi boxes but i can only see sdi ones on their site atm…
i ended up scoring a ‘startech’ dongle which seemed to have decent reviews online for like half what they retail for, they look pretty clean for composite to usb so really hoping it will be compatible but im not holding a ton of hope.
i also managed to grab a cheapo retrotink 2x clone on aliexpress for the latter (and a dirt cheap capture card), after reading a thread on the fb group where you said you could set hdmi output to be SD quality therefore quelling most of the performance issues recur has with hdmi.
hopefully somewhere between the two i’ll be able to cook something up for my ideal workflow, i’m trying to do like a double layered recur setup where the output of one recur pi will be heading into the capture of the other one, meaning i could do some of the things that aren’t possible with the a single ‘layered’ recur shader setup.
anyway thanks again for your time. i’m to be vjing my first shows later this year and recur is going to be an integral part of my workflow. you coding fellas are truly the salt of the earth putting this stuff up for free. mucho luv