"Live" Mode

There is special mode in MPC which is called "Live". In this mode Media Player Classic "plays" video and sound from capture devices - TV-tuners, web-cameras, VIVO-videocards and another. This mode works with any devices, which have installed and working drivers on your system.

To turn this mode on, go to File  Open Device. There will be a window like one on the picture below with the list of devices installed on your system:

Select proper device and press OK. There must be a picture coming from your card. Channel switching is done by buttons of next/previous file in playlist. Unfortunately, channel tuning is available only through the WDM-driver interface now.

Videocapturing

MPC also allows you to capture video & audio in AVI or OGM. You need to open capturing panel for this (View  Capture или Ctrl-8)



Video group

You can select input device, framerate, colourspace, size of frames here. In case of manual setting of framesize don't forget to press Set button in order to save settings. Because of some problems the capture size is not saved between sessions. This would be fixed, i hope.

Audio group

You can select mixer input here (TV-tuner is usually connected to Line-In or Aux), sound options and format.

Output group

In order to capture video and sound you need to turn on Record Video and Record Audio options. Preview checkboxes are for turning on real-time preview of material.
Don't forget that with some audio configurations an unwanted effect of reverberation may appear because of slowing down audio, which is going through the program. You need to turn off preview.

You can select for audio and video codecs which are installed in your system. Codec options are set in fields near the list of codecs or in the window which appears after the selection of codec (it depends on the certain codec).

In case of problems with capturing (framedrop) you can try to increase the V/A buffers quantity (50 by default), but this hardly increases memory load. Output Audio Separately checkbox can help you if the sound is not synchronized with video.

Note: because of some OGM DirectShow codec's problems capturing in this format may be incorrect.

 ©2003 YDY
 Translated by Fireball