Re: On VHS capture hardware/software that works with Debian
Dear Tim,
On Mar 02 2009, Tim Beauregard wrote:
> Rogério Brito wrote:
> > Therefore, I would like to know the experiences of people from the
> > Debian community regarding both software and hardware for this very
> > task. I would like to record what I have in analog form with the highest
> > quality possible (and, latter, I can think of converting the final
> > result to a DVD, iPod, MPEG-4 ASP file etc).
>
> I went through this about a year ago, first attempt was with an ATI
> Radeon 9200 PCI card, I had problems with finding suitable cables and
> then with macrovision on commercial films.
Well, in my case, I would be using an ATI Rage 128 Fury card, which
predates the Radeon's, as far as I know.
The macrovision thing wouldn't be a problem, as I'm mostly concerned
with home-made recordings (like family encounters and such things) but
it is nice to know about that limitation. As I posted in an earlier
message, I'm not that familiar with the hardware side of things.
> I then bought a Hauppauge WinTV PVR 150, it does hardware encoding
> which means nil CPU usage. This proved faultless for all my
> conversions.
Nice to know. Encoding in which format, BTW? MPEG-2?
> v4l2-ctl is used to set all the parameters used by the card; the
> capture command is as easy as
>
> $ cat /dev/video0 > raw.mpg
That's perfect! Just what the doctor prescribed.
> I used ffmpeg to encode to DVD format, with the commands
>
> $ ffmpeg -i raw.mpg -ss 00:00:02.9 -t 00:49:49.1 -ildct -ilme -target
> dvd -b 5172k -cropbottom 16 -pass 1 pass1.mpg
> $ ffmpeg -i raw.mpg -ss 00:00:02.9 -t 00:49:49.1 -ildct -ilme -target
> dvd -b 5172k -cropbottom 16 -pass 2 pass2.mpg
Very nice. I will keep those 2 pass lines here for further reference.
I may, perhaps, take the input directly from /dev/video0 (if I ever
manage to get things right), depending on my processing power (even
though I'm using a Pentium D 805 like I mentioned in the earlier
message, I will probably use a Duron 1GHz for this task).
> Bitrate was calculated to produce a file sized for a single layer DVD
> (alter this depending on the length of your mpegs).
No problems.
> I used dvdauthor to produce basic DVDs, and
> http://mightylegends.zapto.org/dvd/dvdauthor_howto.php
> has an excellent walk-thru on more elaborate DVD menus.
Thanks. Authoring the DVD menus was/is something that i used to do by
hand, and not with many tools that are available today. They surely
help.
Thank you very much for all the comments, Rogério.
--
Rogério Brito : rbrito@{mackenzie,ime.usp}.br : GPG key 1024D/7C2CAEB8
http://www.ime.usp.br/~rbrito : http://meusite.mackenzie.com.br/rbrito
Projects: algorithms.berlios.de : lame.sf.net : vrms.alioth.debian.org
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