Recording TV onto PC : WAS [Nottingham] Students

Martin Garton nottingham at mailman.lug.org.uk
Fri Jan 10 09:55:01 2003


On Fri, 10 Jan 2003, BUNTER MATTHEW wrote:

> I am trying to figure a way to get parts of a wedding video on VHS
> into an mpeg type format (no blackmailing involved I assure you). I

I had some success in with something like this about a year ago. I used a 
bt878 based card (its a wintv theater IIRC)

I captured about half an hour from a VHS video, and eventually got it 
recorded onto VCD to play in our DVD player.

I tried all sorts of combinations of different tools at the time, and each 
had their pros and cons. I can't remember the exact combination I went 
with in the end, but here is what I do remember:

(any corrections/additions  from ppl appreciated)

For capture:

nuppelvideo - this was very easy to get up and running and will simply 
record from each frame into one file which is in its own very simple 
uncompressed format. (at least i believe its uncompressed, if it is, its 
certainly nothing very clever)

NVrec - this has quite a few dependencies but once installed will allow 
recording into a much wider range of formats. eg, on the fly mpeg1 or 
mpeg2 compression.  I _think_ it also did on realtime divx compression, 
using avifile and the windows codecs (this was before native mpeg4 stuff 
on linux) which is silly unless you have a very fast machine.

In any case, my machine was not fast enough to realtime encode mpeg2, and 
thats what i wanted for the SVCD, so since I would be re-encoding after 
capture, the size of the initially captured file was not so important.

Mpeg2 encoding:

For this, I used mjpeg-tools which does the job very nicely. It also comes
with a capture tool which I didnt try because at the time it didn't
support my card. After using two of three of the included tools and 
generating a couple of intermediate files, you end up with an mpeg1/2 of 
the video which is suitable for making a (s)vcd if you want to.

Making a (s)vcd:
vcdimager is the tool I used (in fact its the only one I found)
I think 0.6.x is the stable series which actually gave me problems due to 
lack of support for some mpeg files. 0.7.x (unstable) worked perfectly for 
me. This produces a .bin and a .cue file which you can burn to a cd with 
cdrdao.

Overall I was happy with the results except for the occasional minor
"stutter" on the image. Im fairly certain that this was introduced during 
the capture of the video, probably due to my machine not always keeping 
up, and high latencies.  It has been suggested that I try with a low 
latency patched kernel (possibly also pre-empt kernel) but I haven't tried 
that yet.

Hope some of that is useful.

-- 
Martin.