Record TV

Mplayer can record from TV to a file. It will be interesting to see if the data rate to write to a USB flash device is fast enough to capture an hour long TV show. This example from the MPlayer docs.

A more sophisticated example. This makes MEncoder capture the full PAL image, crop the margins, and deinterlace the picture using a linear blend algorithm. Audio is compressed with a constant bitrate of 64kbps, using LAME codec. This setup is suitable for capturing movies.

mencoder -tv driver=v4l:width=768:height=576 -oac mp3lame -lameopts cbr:br=64\
    -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=900 \
    -vf crop=720:544:24:16,pp=lb -o output.avi tv://