Re: Video capture hardware / software
On Sun, 11 Aug 2002 18:52:48 -0400
Neal Lippman <nl@lippman.org> wrote:
> Does anyone have any suggestions for _working_ video capture hardware
> / software under woody? My task is basically to take some tapes that
> I have made and convert them to .mpg files. I need both video capture
> hardware which works well under woody, and software to work with the
> files and the hardware.
>
> I've seen consumer-oriented products like Pinnacle DV and Dazzle at
> the local Best Buy, but I'm not sure how well these are supported by
> linux and the linux USB layer (for Dazzle) at present.
My general advice for hardware: If you want cheap and money is an issue,
google for bttv-based cards (IIRC the bt means Brooktree and is the name
of the chip that powers most consumer-grade video capture cards). One
step up are the zoran-based cards. The most popular appears to be the
Pinnacle DC 10, or whatever the company's marketing geniuses have
renamed it to. It does hardware mjpeg compression (mjpeg is short for
motion jpeg, which isn't quite mpeg).
I know zero about USB solutions.
As for the software, one of the most actively maintained is
mjpegtools[1]. This allows you to capture videos with you bttv- or
zoran-based cards. The quality is, depending on the quality of the
source signal, relatively good. mjpeg is less lossy than mpeg because it
compresses on a frame by frame basis. On the downside, mjpeg encoding is
quite processor intensive, as is the transcoding necessary to convert
the mjpegs to mpeg format. On my Duron 800 I can do practically nothing
when mjpegtools is running or I get lots of dropped frames.
If you want something slimmer, I recommend nvrec[2], which is actually a
frontend to several video encoding backends, including the proprietary
DivX (you need to download the actual codec from divx.com) and
NuppleVideo[3], a supposedly frame-drop-proof encoder.
Note that the biggest problem you'll have when encoding videos is the
synchronization between audio and video. Both mjpegtools and nvrec do
sync correction.
The Debian "default" (if there be one) capture tool is probably the one
that come with Gerd Knorr's xawtv package, streamer.
[1]http://mjpeg.sourceforge.net/
[2]http://nvrec.sourceforge.net/
[3]http://mars.tuwien.ac.at/~roman/nuppelvideo/
Reply to: