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
