VHS Archival

mellofone · 2010-05-10 18:42:16

I have some VHS tapes that I would like to convert and store on my raid array. I have some old Hauppauge PVR-250's laying around that should do the job. Has anyone ever done this before? I know the video quality will be pretty poor, but probably no worse then hooking a VHS player to my TV. Does anyone have any experience with any USB based hardware? Lastly, what would you recommend as far as software? Something simple enough to do maybe a bit of editing if need be...

Thanks in advance.

fukawi2 · 2010-05-10 23:02:51

mellofone wrote:

Lastly, what would you recommend as far as software? Something simple enough to do maybe a bit of editing if need be...

Perhaps dvgrab to rip it, and I find kdenlive excellent for editing....

mellofone · 2010-05-11 18:08:50

I will check out kdenlive. Looks very promising. But I _think_ dvgrab is for digital video only, not shoddy VHS analog...

azleifel · 2010-05-11 18:58:04

I haven't done this for a while but when I did I used a composite video connection from the VCR to my MSI TV@Anywhere card (composite video is less sharp than s-video, which actually makes for a better recording!), used transcode to capture the video as mjpeg and audio as ac3, edited the recording with avidemux (easy because each frame is captured in full), and then recoded the video to mpeg2, again with avidemux.

This is the script that I used to use for the capture. I've no idea whether it still works.

#!/bin/bash

# Generate recording filename
if [ -z "$1" ]; then
    TMPFILE="tmp-`date +%F-%X`-mjpeg.avi"
else
    TMPFILE=$1
fi

# Set capture card
v4lctl -c /dev/video1 setinput Composite1

transcode \
  -u 256,2 \
  -x v4l2=resync_margin=1:resync_interval=250:overrun_guard=1,v4l2 \
  -g 720x576 \
  --import_asr 2 \
  -i /dev/video1 \
  -H 0 \
  -p /dev/dsp1 \
  -e 32000,16,2 \
  -E 48000,16,2 \
  -n 0x1 \
  -N 0x2000 \
  -b 192\
  -J resample,levels,smartyuv,hqdn3d=luma=4:chroma=3:luma_strength=6:chroma_strength=4,pv=cache=30 \
  -y ffmpeg \
  -F mjpeg \
  -o $TMPFILE

fukawi2 · 2010-05-11 22:55:45

mellofone wrote:

But I _think_ dvgrab is for digital video only, not shoddy VHS analog...

Yeah, that was what I wasn't sure about... Apologies if it doesn't work

Dieter@be · 2010-05-12 10:38:36

I use an canopus advc110 to convert analog media to firewire, and use dvgrab to store it (and then i compress it, of course)

however, i could not get it run on arch. see http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=79856, so I had to use another distro..

Arch Linux

#1 2010-05-10 18:42:16

VHS Archival

#2 2010-05-10 23:02:51

Re: VHS Archival

#3 2010-05-11 18:08:50

Re: VHS Archival

#4 2010-05-11 18:58:04

Re: VHS Archival

#5 2010-05-11 22:55:45

Re: VHS Archival

#6 2010-05-12 10:38:36

Re: VHS Archival

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