digitze_your_vhs_tapes

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Digitize your VHS Tapes

i tried with an easyCap usb Stick but that wasn't really a success: under linux it constantly dropped frames and the windows drivers are totally buggy and crap (not to mention how it worked on windows 7 rather than windows xp)..

so i finally took an old pc and put my old hauppauge wintv-pvr 500 in it. the card delivers an mpeg2 stram which can be caputred with close to no cpu load, so no problem here for an old pc :)

in ubuntu install the ivtv-ctrl package and then run

v4l2-ctl -d /dev/video0 -i 2 

this selects the composit input as the current source

now open vlc and choose to open a device, then choose PVR and select no other options just hit play.. you should now see what's coming in to the pvr card.

in the view menu select “advanced controls” you now see a record button which by default will save the current stream as it comes from the card to a subdirectory in your user home called Video. to change this go to tools→prefrences→input & codecs where you see “record directory or filename” .. if you click on “all” under “show settins” in the bottom left corner you should also find the checkbox to chose between raw stream and some default vlc format .. however i recommend leaving it set to record the raw stream.

after you have successfully recorded the move it's time to de-interlace and further compress it (h264 in my case).. i do that with ffmpeg:

ffmpeg -y -i input.mpg -b 1500k -bt 4M -vcodec libx264 -vpre libx264-slow -vf yadif -acodec libfaac -ac 2 -ar 48000 -ab 128k output3.mp4
  • digitze_your_vhs_tapes.1325542266.txt.gz
  • Last modified: 02.01.2012 23:11
  • by Pascal Suter