Pictures and Code

I’ve been searching for some program that is capable of real-time recording XVID videos from my Hauppauge WinTV PCI card. Dscaler needs a lot time for configuring all settings but in the end its a great tool.

You can even “hide” the channel logos using some plug in called “Logo Killer”. Recording XVID on CBR(Constant Bit Rate) at like 900Kbps with some MPEG Layer-3 for Audio works really nice. The Problem is that there is no decent scheduler for recording coming TV shows.

So i found this awesome Java based Open Source project TV-Browser , a free TV program magazine for your Windows, Linux and even Mac.

How to combine these 2 Programs now ? TV-Browser has some Capture Plug-in. You can assign “External Channel Name Parameter” and use command line tools.

Since DScaler has no command line control i tried to make my own. Using the window handle(FindWindow) and  sendMessage (getting the wParam and lParam by Spy++). It works on my Win XP if DScaler is already running.

Further thoughts:

• check if DScaler is running, if not than start it
• adding some flags for record and stop like keydown -c 12 -r
  (switch DScaler to channel 12 and record)

(for some reason the DScaler window can only receive numeric chars by WM_CHAR so i can’t pass {shift+r})

Well, instead of using keystrokes to perform action i tried it this time with menu and window handles. It is working pretty good.

I’ve added the output of the tv channel name out of DScaler.

Other suggestions are welcome. You can download the tool with source code here.