On Tue 2010-02-02 00:10:24 UTC+1100, Peter Goggin (petergog...@bigpond.com) wrote:
> I have a large number of vhs tapes I want to convert to DVDs, hence the > need for analogue. I have a Leadtek Winfast 2000 card in a windows box, > but I really want to move away from windows. Presumably this card will > work with MythTv and TvTime. I use a Leadtek Winfast DTV1000H to capture VHS tapes in Ubuntu 9.10. It works fine with Tvtime. I've also used a Compro VideoMate in the past with no problems. The only fiddly thing was when I couldn't get the audio input on the Winfast card to work, and I had some audio problems with the motherboard's onboard audio (which I've since disabled in the BIOS) so I plugged in an old Yamaha audio card for the audio input. Configuring the Yamaha with alsamixer was a pain. Not at all intuitive. But when I got that working, "alsactl store" was handy. I do a quick record in Audacity to check the audio level before I start the video capture. lspci shows: 01:00.0 Multimedia video controller: Conexant Systems, Inc. CX23880/1/2/3 PCI Video and Audio Decoder (rev 05) 01:00.1 Multimedia controller: Conexant Systems, Inc. CX23880/1/2/3 PCI Video and Audio Decoder [Audio Port] (rev 05) 01:00.2 Multimedia controller: Conexant Systems, Inc. CX23880/1/2/3 PCI Video and Audio Decoder [MPEG Port] (rev 05) 01:01.0 Multimedia audio controller: Yamaha Corporation YMF-724F [DS-1 Audio Controller] (rev 03) I capture with mencoder, using the MJPEG codec: mencoder tv:// -tv \ input=1:norm=PAL-BG:width=720:height=576:audiorate=48000:amode=1:forcechan=2:adevice=/dev/audio \ -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mjpeg -oac copy \ -o capture-`date +%Y-%m-%d-%H%M%S`.avi mencoder will keep recording until you hit Ctrl+C or otherwise kill the process (or run out of disk space...) The catch with this is that you can't have tvtime and mencoder running concurrently, so you won't be able to see the video while mencoder is recording unless you connect a TV to the RF out of the VHS deck. It's possible there's a way to watch and record at the same time using the PC monitor but I haven't found a program that will do that. I used to do it in Windows XP years ago using VirtualVCR, so I know it's technically possible. Maybe MythTV can do it. Once recorded I then open the file with Avidemux. It is frame accurate and a bit similar to VideoReDo. I set the start and end markers, save the file with a new name, then encode that file to XviD using mencoder in two-pass mode, with a makefile that I wrote. I haven't used mencoder to encode to MPEG-2 (for DVD authoring) but I'm pretty sure it can do that. I just prefer XviD for size and portability. There's a limitation with Avidemux in that you can apparently only set a single start and end marker. Depending on your source material this may not matter. You can merge multiple AVI (or MPEG-2) files later if you need to. I just noticed "MPEG Port" (in the lspci output above) is probably a clue that my Winfast can do MPEG-2 hardware encoding. I should investigate that at some stage, although in theory transcoding MJPEG to XviD should give higher quality output than MPEG-2 to XviD. Whether it's noticable with a VHS tape source is another thing... > The computer will have an AMD dual core 64bit processor so load will not > be a problem. I'm just using an old 2.8 GHz Pentium 4, 32-bit, single core. > Are there any video editing programs like VideoRedo available for Linux? VideoReDo is only for editing MPEG-2 so I can't use it for MJPEG captures, but I do use it for editing DVB-T (digital TV, MPEG-2) recordings, under WINE in Ubuntu. I've tried ProjectX (and Avidemux, I think) for MPEG-2 editing, but tend to get odd A/V sync issues with the output files, particularly A/V drift. VideoReDo can be a bit unstable under WINE. Mostly just crashing after it's finished exporting. Not really a showstopper. Regards Andrew -- ubuntu-au mailing list ubuntu-au@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-au
