On Mon, Aug 17, 2009 at 10:43:45PM +0100, Peter wrote:
> Jan Stary wrote:
> >On Aug 17 16:06:05, Peter Kay - Syllopsium wrote:
> >  
> >I wouldn't even consider converting something that is readily available
> >in digital form. The analog VHS material is not available elsewhere,
> >and is slowly deteriorating on these tapes.
> >  
> >>Otherwise :
> >>
> >>1) Find decent hardware (not TV cards) that can capture compressed video 
> >>in real time (2nd hand ebay may help).
> >>    
> >
> >You mean UNcompressed, right?
> No, I mean compressed. The tape is analogue, it's then captured to a 
> compressed digital format with the
> capture card offloading the task from the CPU. It's entirely possible to 
> work directly with compressed
> video and it'll be much lighter on CPU and I/O than capturing in raw 
> format. Ideally you want
> hardware that can capture in your chosen format, so that lengthy 
> transcoding time is not required
> and (if you're fussy - doesn't really apply in the case of VHS) there's 
> no quality loss in the final product.

fwiw, I was capturing/encoding to mpeg4 with ffmpeg and a bktr.  in
realtime, 3 years ago, on a not so fast machine, with OpenBSD.  couldn't
quite do full DVD quality in realtime though.  wouldn't surprise me at
all if it can be done with a decent machine today.

as a middle ground between raw (uncompressed), one could capture and encode
to DV.  it converts to mpeg2 quite well.

> >>n particular, my (limited) experience is that video capture on TV cards 
> >>is A Bit Shit, and capturing uncompressed video is not fun, even if 
> >>modern hardware is probably adequate to handle it.
> >>    
> >
> >After consulting other video people, I will use a digital video camera
> >that can take analog input from a VCR and save it.
> >  
> 
> Sounds wise. Inputing via firewire should be a lot easier than faffing 
> around with analogue capture

firewire is of course not supported by OpenBSD.

-- 
jake...@sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org

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