Software for a TV capture card and DV camera?

jsteel · 2012-01-28 13:59:32

Hi,

I have an old Hauppauge WinTV USB (audio/video capture device) that I'm trying to use to capture some footage (composite connection, not tuner). I've tried various CLI and GUI software and I've had most luck with VLC; I can capture video but not sound.

Before I spend more hours trying to get it working, I wonder if someone would have any recommendations of software that may work well with this device. I'm also about to start using my DV camera so it would be nice if the software will work with both devices. I don't mind if it is CLI or GUI.

Thanks

Malvineous · 2012-01-29 09:59:17

I've used mencoder for this in the past (companion app to mplayer) and it works fairly well. It is nice because you can play around with command line parameters for mplayer, and once you can watch your live video stream correctly you can pass the same parameters to mencoder to record/encode it instead.

I've also used transcode in the past. It seems to be better quality, but it's more complex to get going.

I'm not sure whether transcode can handle TV cards, but mplayer/mencoder can, and probably has the best support out there for obscure cards and the settings needed to get a decent picture out of them.

They can both handle DV by piping data to them from either dvgrab or dvconnect, if you want to both read DV data and transcode it at the same time. Otherwise you can dvgrab/dvconnect to a file and transcode that later. I prefer that option because dvgrab can automatically split the recording up based on the DV index marks, giving you a separate file for each segment of video recorded (assuming your DV camera inserts an index mark every time you press the record button of course!)

toad · 2012-01-30 08:52:17

Congrats on your avatar! Twenty years in Finsbury Park and it never occurred to me...

Have you tried kaffeine? Always worked for me out of the box - depends on kdelibs, kdebase-runtime and xine-lib.

eldragon · 2012-01-30 10:46:08

kino for dv.
mencoder for capture card.

myrlin · 2012-01-30 11:25:18

I have a Hauppage HVR3000 TV card, and use Kaffeine. It works "out of the box" and it's the only package I have found that provides a reliable TV timer recording facility (except possibly MythTV which I've never managed to fathom!). I've also got mplayer/smplayer to play TV well, but they don't seem to have the timer record function. My big problem was converting the streamed files (m2t format) into a DVD- compliant format, until I discovered

ffmpeg -i "inputfile.m2t" -aspect 16:9 -target pal-dvd "outputfile.mpg"

I'm afraid I don't have any experience of DV cameras.
Hope this helps

jsteel · 2012-01-31 21:48:32

Many thanks for the advice. I will have a play around with everything mentioned.

Cheers

Arch Linux

#1 2012-01-28 13:59:32

Software for a TV capture card and DV camera?

#2 2012-01-29 09:59:17

Re: Software for a TV capture card and DV camera?

#3 2012-01-30 08:52:17

Re: Software for a TV capture card and DV camera?

#4 2012-01-30 10:46:08

Re: Software for a TV capture card and DV camera?

#5 2012-01-30 11:25:18

Re: Software for a TV capture card and DV camera?

#6 2012-01-31 21:48:32

Re: Software for a TV capture card and DV camera?

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