Linux Video Capture [Was Re: [SWLUG] Giving up Windows]

[Steve Hill]

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On Tue, 1 Mar 2005, Julian Hall wrote:

> 1.  Software to capture video in Linux.

MythTV if you want a full PVR.
mencoder or ffmpeg will also let you capture from video4linux devices.
It also depends on what hardware you have - if you have something like a 
PVR250 card then you can just cat the device to a file since it has a 
hardware mpeg2 encoder (I think you can do similar with the DVB cards to 
get the mpeg2 stream as it is received).

> 2.  Hardware.  I've fallen foul of trusting recommendations from the 'net 
> previously. One site recommended the Pinnacle DC10+, while another one said 
> the WinTV PVR 250 did not work in Linux.  To my cost I have since found the 
> reverse to be true *growl*.  So anyone actually *using* a capture card in 
> Linux, could you advise me please?  Full DVD quality (720*576 @ 25fps) 
> ideally with hardware encoder for best performance.  No need for a tuner as 
> it plugs straight into my video recorder.

The cheapo bttv (e.g. Hauppauge WinTV/PCI) work, although you need a 
reasonable CPU since you're doing encoding in software.  the PVR250/350 
cards *do* work in Linux (lots of MythTV people use them) and don't need a 
chunky CPU since they encode in hardware (I have no personal experience of 
them though).  There are also a number of DVB cards which work, but thats 
no good if you want to suck video off the VCR.  For a good quality video 
signal you want to supply the card with an S-Video signal rather than 
composite.  Unfortunately VHS records the composite signal so you're 
stuck with a composite signal and already waaay below DVD quality.

  - Steve       Jabber: steve at nexusuk.org     Web: http://www.nexusuk.org/

      Servatis a periculum, servatis a maleficum - Whisper, Evanescence

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