[pvrusb2] WinTV PVR2 issues

[Lorne Shantz]

I gave up a month or so back. Thought I'd give it another try. If anyone else besides Mike can help, please chime in, I know he is busy.

I have only been able to get my pvr working from within MythTV intermittently, and I don't want to use it anyhow. Too complex. I just want a simple TV program to watch tv and capture once in awhile. Right now this is not possible. I am using Opensuse 11.3 with all the drivers, so I KNOW this sucker works. The red light comes on when I hook to it. 

Mike had said to use Xawtv or some other program. http://www.isely.net/pvrusb2/usage.html#xawtv

So following this, I tried xawtv. I have 3.95. Tried downloading a 4.x version, but there are none. I grabbed the snapshot, but I can not get it to compile. ?? It is only 720k, and I'm obviously  missing something. The instructions just simply say to do a make etc. So they are making an assumption that I have something. So scratch xawtv. Dead in the water.

Note that anything before version 4 will definitely not work with this since earlier versions did not support mpeg2 decoding.

next: Another application that works is mplayer. There are three ways to use mplayer: The first method does not work.... Mike you got a sense of humor man! :)

Coudn't get it to work. No video. mplayer pvr://dev/video1
Teammplayer: could not connect to socket
mplayer: No such file or directory
Failed to open LIRC support. You will not be able to use your remote control.

I suspect that last error is not biggy. 
Playing pvr://dev/video1.
[v4l2] select channel list europe-east, entries 133
[v4l2] unable to find channel dev/video1
[pvr] Using device /dev/video0
[pvr] Detected BT878 video (Hauppauge (bt878))
[encoder] device do not support MPEG input.
Failed to open pvr://dev/video1.

The above may well be enough to point me in the right direction. 

Next tried: 
vlc - < /dev/video
Produces no errors, I get a VLC window. Nothing plays, and I tinkered around and nothing works, however the red led lights up. 
vlc stream://vlc stream:///video/video0
/video/video1 produces: 0xa20db0] filesystem access error: cannot open file /video/video1 (No such file or directory)