PVR support in MPlayer

When toying around with mplayer and my Hauppauge PVR350, I got the following error when trying to play something:

[pvr] failed with errno 22 when reading 2048 bytes
[pvr] read 0 bytes

The error kept repeating. The solution was to give the proper bitrates. I used the following for DVD-compatible rates in my ~/.mplayer/config file:

[ivtv]
mpegopts=format=dvd
tv=normid=0:device=/dev/video0:width=720:height=576
pvr=arate=48000:abitrate=384:vbitrate=6000000:
         vpeak=9600000:aspect=1:fmt=dvd
of=mpeg=1

To play, use mplayer pvr:// -profile ivtv. You can also copy this section to your mencoder config file and store the video stream from your PVR card to a dvd-compatible MPEG2 stream. I’ve successfully burnt such a file using KMediaFactory and K3B.