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Video Capturing Guide at Ars Technica
Deffexor writes "For those of you who read Ars Technica, but do not visit our forum, we have an active Audio/Visual Club where we talk shop about everything ranging from TVs to Stereos to Speakers to Videocards and everything in between. Lately, there has been a lot of interest in capturing broadcast television and converting old VHS home movies to a more timeless digital format, such as VCD, SVCD, and DVD. As more and more people become interested, it becomes increasingly difficult to educate everyone on how to do this properly. Tapping the collective consciousness of the Ars A/V forum, we bring you the 1st part of the Ars Technica Guide to Video Capturing, Cleaning, and Compression."
Feh. The article is all about capturing video on a PC with 'Microsoft Windows98/ME/2000/XP'. How about linking to some of the interesting work happening in Linux video capture instead.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
We bring you the 1st part of the Ars Technica Guide to p0rn^H^H^H^HVideo Capturing, Cleaning, and Compression.
Is this a colloquial expression that Michael uses for jerking off?
I don't think they're referring directly to porn Mike, although I'm sure you can copy your VHS anime collection over to DVD if you so desire.
Cheers.
1. Capture source (& clean on the fly with the new Video Soap in the MMC 8.1 software). .vcr file to mpeg2 (ATI likes capturing in it's own format better). :)
2. Export
3. Run mpg file through FlaskMPEG to convert to DivX video with MP3 audio.
4. Cut commercials in VirtualDub and save using Direct Stream Copy (on Audio & Video settings)
5. Enjoy your capped copy of the (hopefully not) last episode of Farscape
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
Timeless? Hardly. If the media lasts 50 years, the technology certainly won't. The answer: convert all your old home videos to microfilm. It' s the way of the future.
It's supposed to be completely automatic, but actually you have to press this button.
http://homepage.mac.com/rnc/
They mention using Roxio's Toast for creating the SVCD. I just copied the image files and toc to my linux box and used cdrdao to create the SVCD.
I've got the Hauppauge bt848 based tv-tuner, but how do I record with Linux? I'm looking to make it almost Tivo-like. Any ideas?
Note.. this is very Windows biased though.
Anyhoo... here it is. Enjoy.
One thing here is that this is fine for grabbing TV or plugging into a video camera....
But in Europe and Japan we have a different problem, we have mobile phones that can capture video, send video and even play video streams. Transcoding of this is a massive deal and will be "very cool to have" going forwards.
I like this article for the summary it gives of the problems I had yesterday.
But with a more connected world are the problems the same ?
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
If you want control and easy scripting, get Linux and capture with something like "dvgrab" and compress it with "ffmpeg" or "transcode" (search on Google, they pop right up). You can view with "xine" or "mplayer", and there are a bunch of editing solutions for Linux as well (although probably not as good as the commercial stuff).
If you want a no-frills, no-thoughts solutions, just get a Mac and use iMovie. It lets you capture, do some edits, then compress and burn to disk. Very easy to use (but nowhere near as flexible as the Linux solution).
MythTV
--- witty signature
Check out MythTV
It was a joke! When you give me that look it was a joke.
I recently started a thread on Ars asking for information for external input boxes so I could watch cable television without the television. I received many responses and have since started to look into TV tuner cards as well as a few more external solutions.
If anyone has any other suggestions, good bad or indifferent feel free to let me know, the more choices and information I have the better.
Well I read the article and I must say that I'm glad I just don't have to bother - I have a 30Hr PVR that is fully integrated with the satellite receiver and can IR blast to control my VCR if necessary. The picture quality is indistinguishable from the live broadcast, it even records high end audiostreams when available (though I keep meaning to expirement and see if it is even recording SAP and other signals...). But most importantly my wife can use it - in fact she loves the system to death...she would get quite anxious if a PC appeared attached to the entertainment system... Pause/Record etc all the standard VCR controls are built into the remote.
Though they seem to have the best settings all ready to go - maybe someone will write software to handle all of this automatically?
Even better will be once DVD-R stereo component style decks become common place and affordable. That would be much nicer for archiving than the VCR!
Russell Pavlicek has an article on his web site about turning an old PC into a Linux-PVR.
where we talk shop about everything ranging from TVs to Stereos to Speakers to Videocards and everything in between
in between those things??
That would be cables...
If at first you don't succeed, remove all evidence you ever tried.--David Brent
I've been working on doing this very same thing - transferring some 8" & 12" laserdiscs that will never be released on a modern format (80's music videos, mostly).
One thing I've saw is that the article specifies a 40gb hard drive as a minimum. That's laughably small. I have twin 80gb drives spanned via RAID, and I filled them up with most of one side of a movie (about 50 minutes of video). Not only do I need more room for the 2nd side of the movie, I also need room for producing the final DVD MPEG files before burning them. Next paycheck I'm buying a couple of 200gb drives to replace them with, and I'm concerned that even they might not be large enough.
It also doesn't hurt to have the fastest CPU available. I'm on a Athlon XP 1800, and mastering/producing takes longer than the source material is (15min of material takes ~20min to produce). Don't think dual CPUs will help, as the production process is pretty much single-threaded.
Chip H.
a tivo-like device, another, and linuxtv.org. That should be enough to get you started...
Sorry to teel ya this ... but a Video tape will outlive the average hard disk and CDR by years and years.
Most CDrs and DVDrs will be lucky to be readable in 5 to 10 years. Even though the specs say they should have 100 years of life, those are lab stats and never happen in the real world.
flame away techno zealots !!!
BUT, the MUCH easier way is to use a device with a built in MPEG2 encoder chip. Plug in analog and it spits out an MPEG2 file. As mentioned previously, the Dazzle Hollywood DV-Bridge. The Hauppauge WinTV PVR-350 is another product with a hardware MPEG2 encoder.
But probably the easiest way to do this is to just go buy a Standalone DVD recorder.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
1. Capture in as lossless and high resolution a format as you can. It's much easier to discard information than to make more in upscaling.
2. Halving the resolution means you can reduce the picture size by 4 times. But this does not mean you can quarter the bandwidth. Smaller pictures contain more detail per macroblock of 8x8 or 16x16.
3. Lots and lots of disk space. I purchased another 60 gigs just for the capture space. Never mind the processing space.
4. Since the article stays in Windows, try avisynth to do some of the post-processing. It saves quite a bit of disk space, but at the expense of time if doing two stage encoding.
5. If using Linux, transcode is fairly good, but it lacks the configurability of avisynth and Virtualdub with filters. It's just not as complete a set.
6. Interlacing bites. And an analog TV signal will definitely have an interlaced signal. You don't notice it on television because of the permanance of phosphorence. On a monitor that will do 85Hz, it's glaringly obvious. So do an inverse telecine on the video before encoding.
7. Big iron box. Encoding with any nontrivial filters (like an unsharp mask, or worse yet, noise smoother) will take a lot more CPU time than you could have imagined. Thank goodness that encoding is one of the most parallelizable things to do out there though.
I'd post more but I think this is enough noise for today.
Doing the Right Thing should not be preempted by making a buck.
"Timeless" is not the word for these formats. "Reproducible with high fidelty", maybe, but in general hard drives and digital optical media don't survive all that long. For archival purposes, these media are next to worthless.
Unfortunately, the only solution seems to be to rerecord from old media every time there is a media upgrade (e.g. film -> VHS -> DVD -> ?) otherwise you run the chance of not being able to read the media!
--Rob
Towards the Singularity.
> converting old VHS home movies to a more timeless digital format, such as VCD, SVCD, and DVD
I have kids that handle my videotapes and DVDs, and let me tell you ALL of the videotapes are still going strong and most of the DVDs have been rendered useless from mishandling. When I borrow movies from the library (not yet a felony) I always choose videotapes over DVDs because heavily used DVDs are almost always unwatchable due to freezes, skips, and garbled scenes.
My paid-for DVDs are being destroyed by normal use, and the MPAA would like to make me a criminal if I make copies of those DVDs... but that's a different rant...
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Single threaded, but you can cluster the work. At worst, you prepare a network that has a server handing off 150-300 frames at a time. (And if you're putting keyframes in at a lower rate than that, your video random seek times must suck.)
Doing the Right Thing should not be preempted by making a buck.
I don't want to capture stuff from the TV. I would like to capture stuff directly from the VGA output and recorded as a DV stream, without going through the tv out port of the video card. The question is that if there is any VGA to DV adapter out there? /V
This is a decent product that comes with a great set of bundled software.. Only about $125 too...
This is an external device that does the mpeg compression on the fly. I have had very good results making DVDs out of my old 15-20 yearold VHS tapes. Some advice: Buy a new VCR, makes a lot of difference, and they are cheap now (my Toshiba from Sam's Club was only $60).
adstech.com is the home page for thier products.
Use at least a lossless compressor like HuffYUV or even, with a good machine, you could DivX or something on the fly at a high bitrate, and you /could/ even capture the audio in MP3 directly, or else just at 44.1Khz/16bit.
There's no way you should be needing that much hard disk space for a 50 min capture. I only have 80 Gig in all, and I captured and compressed a 2 hour film in MPEG-1 format, high quality, on the fly, on a PII - 350MHz @ 400x300 or something around that don't remember the exact figure. If I had a better CPU I could do better resolution and MPEG-2 on the fly.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
I bought an AIW 9700 yesterday, getting home and installing it, just in time to miss the first couple minutes, but able to capture about 3 hours, before it became seriously rehashed news. On the spur of the moment I saved the TV as mpeg and tried it this morning. The picture is find, but sound is horrible. Any suggestions?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Just in time for me to capture my favourite war moments to show the kids :-)
Like the part where Saddam says "Hey! You said we had WOMD, well here they are boys!"
A few months ago, I made some attempt to digitize some VHS Tapes, with 4 different devices each reletively cheap (under $100) (Linx USB Plus Video Capture Cable, Belkin USB VideoBus II Video Capture Adapter, ATI TV Wonder, and Creative Labs Video Blaster Digital VCR). I was able to get the best quality out of Digital VCR though the software was buggy and annoying. The one click remote control recording was great, but once recorded, the movies are difficult to work with and extract to a file (The ridiculous little program it came with to extract video files was pure trash). The two usb devices were convenient, but neither could offer a serious representation of the vhs (each allowing a very limited resolution and quality with the very limited usb 1.0 bandwidth). As for the ATI tv-wonder, i had endless problems with color and quality as well as dropped frames. By the way, I was using an amd 1700+ with a 60gb harddrive. Some of my problems may have been user based, but after all this trouble, the next time i'll probably go for an analog to dv converter, or a digital camcorder with analog in.
DV bridges (such as the Dazzle or the Canopus products) are great for creating DV streams, but they don't solve the MPEG2 or other transcoding problems since they often rely on software codecs and real-time encoding.
I had high hopes for the Hauppauge 350 card, but the one I got was awful. On the first system I used it in (PIII700) it wouldn't work at all until I re-loaded all the drivers with a batch of beta ones supplied by Tech support. The card then *mostly* worked (it did produce good MPEG2 captures), but the system was nearly frozen and at 100% cpu utlization. Changes to the capture application lagged by 3-4 seconds. I moved the card to a PIII 933 system and it didn't work *at all* no matter what drivers I used.
What I see as missing is a companion to the DV bridge that supplies hardware MPEG1/2 compression and decompression so that transcoding can take place at 2x-4x. Software-only solutions like TMPGEnc produce great video, but on my Dual 667 PIII system its at 1/4x, slower yet in multipass conversions. Basically I want an MPEG2 codec card that transcoding to/from MPEG2 can be handed off to, much like any other coprocessor solution.
There are really high end cards that appear to be able to do this, but they often cost thousands.
I also hate the patchwork software -- you need 8 applications to do one thing, and they don't all work well all the time.
Standalone DVD recorders are probably the best solution if you're just looking to convert VHS or other sources to DVD. Simple, easy to use, and produces good results (we have a Pioneer model here at work). They're still pretty expensive, though, and they're missing the obvious feature -- firewire connectivity for ripping discs (even if only ripping "open" discs made by the player). If these can hit the ~$400 mark, I'd snap one up right away.
Please don't use OGG codecs for something that you want to share with people. MP3 is the de facto standard. If you use anything else, your avi file is as good as a corrupted, unplayable avi file.
1) Place hidden camera in bedroom
2) Have a wank
3) Capture footage
4) Edit DV
5) Encode to MPEG2
6) Burn DVD
7) Sell to friends
8) Profit!!!
I have been running a site called www.dazzlegeek.com for several years now... Video capture is the main focus and there is some great resources.
http://www.dazzlegeek.com
heyday
__________
http://www.phonebillsaver.com
************* www.phonecow.com www.handerazone.com
Also, they recommend a $1000 dollar "edit" VCR or a standalone time base corrector. You could just as easily buy a digital VHS deck with a built in time base corrector and built in digital noise correction for $800. I use this deck to stream VHS tapes to my Mac via a Firewire bridge for transfer to DVD. The built-in TBC makes a noticeable difference. In any case, maybe it's time for me to add something to my Faq-O-Matic about transferring VHS for all systems.
* As is generally the case, my opinions do not reflect those of my employer.
Those DV Bridges cost roughly $300; you can get an analog TV tuner for $50.
Not sure about all aspects, but for MPEG2 encoding (making DVD's & SVCD's) it is a serious boost. Even Hyperthreading helps.
TMPGEnc w/ Hyperthreading
Surely iMovie is all we need to do this. Unless your a hobbyist freak with pixel perfect vision and audiophile ears you'll be pushed to tell much difference - and the several weeks of your life you saved can be spent playing frisbee on a beach.
Now lets see... a: Frisbee on a beach, or b: Hacking about with a capture card. Mmmmm frisbeeeee
The first batch of 3 would simply lock up when you tried to do anything longer than 5 minutes. The time got shorter as the bridges heated up. Dazzle replaced all three after many, many emails.
The second batch was no better, although one would occasionally work. More emails: we sent those back.
Batch 3: still all bad. At this point I simply gave up and went out and bought Formac bridges. More expensive, but very solid.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
That solution is perfect if you want to capture from your DV camcorder. If you want to capture from other sources, it's no help. Recording from VCR to camcorder to DV-Bridge is sub-optimal.
is you capture it as an mpeg, it's not nearly as editable as an AVI though. sure you can cut & splice mpegs, but thats about it. AVI's let you do alot of cool things, but thats the trade off. they are huge
You only get significant boots if you're encoding with the whole video stream. MPEG-2 works something like this:
1. Grab 15 frames of the source
2. Encode first frame as an I frame (no dependancies).
3. Encode second frame as a P frame (depends on the last I frame.)
4. Encode a few B frames (Bi-Directional, depends on the last and next P frames).
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 until all 15 frames are used up.
Wash, rinse, repeat until you've consumed your input video.
If you are capturing while you are encoding, you have to buffer 30 frames to see a significant speed boost from SMP. Otherwise, all the dependancies mean that it's very close to single-threaded. Of course, you can encode multiple B frames simultaneously, but that is a small part of the whole process. However, if you have the whole video stream available to you, you can grab 15 frames per processor and cut your encoding time very nearly in half.
Now you'll see the standard SMP boost of one process not tying up the whole system, but that's another story.
From the article:
"We strongly recommend using a Windows2000/XP machine since the NTFS file system has no such file size limitation."
In fact, NTFS does have an upper bound on how large a single file can be. In theory, NTFS can have a file that is 16 exabytes minus 1 KB (2^64 bytes minus 1 KB). However, from an implementation standpoint, NTFS can only have a file as large as 16 terabytes minus 64 KB (2^44 bytes minus 64 KB) (yeah, way to go MS...). Not that anyone will be making video files that are 16 TB large, but the limit does exist.
More info at MS Technet
/<en
Ok, I know it's been mentioned a couple times already that DVD/VCD/etc are hardly "timeless" formats. This goes doubly for your run-of-the-mill blanks that are burned. They've got what? A 10 year life-span if you never touch them before they start to degrade?
Regular film and microfilm have been around for decades and still going strong for archiving. You can still find VHS tapes from 20+ years ago that are watchable. Heck, books have been around for millenia.
Beyond degradation of the media, the technology to read it quickly becomes obsolete. How many reel-to-reel machines do you have in your house? 8-track? In 50 years, let's see if anyone has a DVD player anymore.
What's the answer for preserving all those movies? I think it's obvious. Flipbooks.
- In hell, treason is the work of angels.
1. Turn on Formac DV.
2. Plug RCA/Coax/S-Video into Formac DV/TV.
3. Turn on iMovie or BTV.
4. Done.
From there, I can capture movies (and convert to MP4, add effects, etc), or capture screenshots. No muss, no fuss.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
I'd like my video captures to remain REALLY REALLY DIRTY!
Well I have the Pinnacle Studio Deluxe which works well in Windows. However the analog portion doesn't work under Linux. I believe that the Dazzle is the same way. With that being said with my BT848 TV Tuner card & GF3 w/TV out and lots of HD space, I'm ready to convert a large (over a 100) VHS tapes to CDR using maybe Mpeg-4. There's a lot of encoding/decoding solutions for Linux, but their doesn't seem be be any filtering/video processing software for Linux. You know cleaning up video. Correcting defects, etc.
I own a P4 2GHz machine with an ASUS GeForce4 Ti4400 which I use hooked up to a VCR to record old family videos. Since the videos were recorded with a camcorder from the very early 1990s, the quality isn't too good - not to mention that the VHS tapes themselves are 12 years old. Therefore, I don't expect to get better resolution than 320x240.
At this resolution, using VirtualDub, I can capture direct to a DivX AVI file (usually with a 2048kbs bitrate) without dropping a single frame. Sound is recorded uncompressed, and simply exported from the video, compressed to MP3, and imported again. Saves a lot of time, and the video never has to be reencoded causing further degradation.
Anyone know of any cards that can capture component (or rgb) video at 1080?
Uncompressed is fine.
*_g_o_a_t_s_e_x_*_g_o_a_t_s_e_x_*_g_o_a_t_s_e_x_*_ _ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ _
t|_______`._____________|_________|_______:_____t
s`________|_____________|________\|_______|_____s
e_\_______|_/_______/__\\\___--___\\_______:____e
x__\______\/____--~~__________~--__|_\_____|____x
*___\______\_-~____________________~-_\____|____*
g____\______\_________.--------.______\|___|____g
o______\_____\______//_________(_(__>__\___|____o
a_______\___.__C____)_________(_(____>__|__/____a
t_______/\_|___C_____)/______\_(_____>__|_/_____t
s______/_/\|___C_____)__YOU__|__(___>___/__\____s
e_____|___(____C_____)\______/__//__/_/_____\___e
x_____|____\__|_____\\_________//_(__/_______|__x
*____|_\____\____)___`----___--'_____________|__*
g____|__\______________\_______/____________/_|_g
o___|______________/____|_____|__\____________|_o
a___|_____________|____/_______\__\___________|_a
t___|__________/_/____|_________|__\___________|t
s___|_________/_/______\__/\___/____|__________|s
e__|_________/_/________|____|_______|_________|e
x__|__________|_________|____|_______|_________|x
*_g_o_a_t_s_e_x_*_g_o_a_t_s_e_x_*_g_o_a_t_e_x_*_
Important Stuff: Please try to keep posts on topic. Try to reply to other people's comments instead of starting new threads. Read other people's messages before posting your own to avoid simply duplicating what has already been said. Use a clear subject that describes what your message is about. Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated. (You can read everything, even moderated posts, by adjusting your threshold on the User Preferences Page) Important Stuff: Please try to keep posts on topic. Try to reply to other people's comments instead of starting new threads. Read other people's messages before posting your own to avoid simply duplicating what has already been said. Use a clear subject that describes what your message is about. Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated. (You can read everything, even moderated posts, by adjusting your threshold on the User Preferences Page) Important Stuff: Please try to keep posts on topic. Try to reply to other people's comments instead of starting new threads. Read other people's messages before posting your own to avoid simply duplicating what has already been said. Use a clear subject that describes what your message is about. Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated. (You can read everything, even moderated posts, by adjusting your threshold on the User Preferences Page)
http://nvrec.sf.org
http://www.sourceforge.net
console based and scriptable
Genius doesn't work on an assembly line basis. You can't simply say, "Today I will be brilliant."
Um, I think that person is going to encode to DVD, which is MPEG-2. If you are going to reencode to MPEG-2 then MPEG-1 and DivX / MPEG-4 and most lossy codecs aren't acceptable intermediaries if you want minimal degradation.
gimme your fucking lunch money
Not necessarily. I've capped many items with VCD 352x240 frame resolution with with HuffY and it generally takes 5-6 gig per hour of video assuming 44.1kHz stereo audio.
If the laserdiscs are capped at a higher resolution (VCD is roughly 25% of DVD res) then you could easily be looking at 20-25gig/hr. This is what I've seen with average compression of 2.5-3x using Huffy.
-Darkelf
The other poster is correct - I'm copying over to DVD MPEG-2 format. I'm capturing as AVI in order to maintain the original high quality image from the laserdisc. I'm using a S-Video cable to keep as much quality as I can -- AFAIK there are/were no Laserdisc players with component video output, and also, AFAIK, there are no consumer/prosumer video capture cards with component video input (I'm using a ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon 8500DV).
Chip H.
My son and I have been capturing analog video and producing short digital videos and movies for past few months. We have made a goal to do this entirely in Linux and have learned a bit along the way that may be of use to others. My son has recently made some videos for his high school classes that have been voted best in the class. Here's what worked for us:
1. Start with a reasonably recent model PC, such as an Athlon 1700+ or better built on a decent motherboard. Give it at least 512Mb of RAM and make sure you have at least 20Mb or more of free disk space.
2. Use a relatively recent version of Linux with at least a 2.4.18 kernel. Most distributions which use this kernel (e.g., Red Hat 7.3) include drivers which support the capture cards listed below.
3. We've been using two types of PCI capture cards: an Iomega Buz, and a Linux Media Labs LML33. The Buz is out of production, but it can regularly be had on ebay for $20-$40. It is based on the Zoran MJPEG chipset and Phillips video encoder chips. As a side benefit, it also contains an ultra SCSI controller that is supposedly supported in Linux, though I haven't tried it yet. The LML33 was designed spefically with Linux in mind, and is also based on the Zoran MJPEG chipset, but it uses a BrookTree video encoder. It is also a bit more expensive; we paid $125 for a used one on ebay. Both cards are well supported in Linux, and produce high quality DVD-resolution 720x480 video at 30 frames/second.
4. Install a recent version of mjpegtools. The most important piece of mjpegtools is the lavrec utility, which supports recording from the Zoran cards to either AVI or Quicktime formatted MJPEG files. mjpegtools also includes several other useful utilities.
5. Install a recent distribution of Transcode. Transcode is a very useful suite of command line utilities for transcoding and processing videos and supports just about every video codec available on Linux.
6. Install Cinelerra and Blender. Cinelerra is a bit quirky, still tends to crash a lot, and is butt-ugly, but it has some awesome editing and compositing abilities including multiple layer editing and compositing, and keyframe-based effects control. The most recent version also contains a nice adaptive de-interlace filter. Cinelerra also contains a very nice translate filter that can be used to trim edge artifacts that often appear in captured video. Blender is gread for things like generating 3-D titles and short 3-D blurbs and transition animations if you like to do those kinds of things. Gimp is also quite useful for generating titles and editing individual frames if that is required.
With the above combination of hardware and software, you can achive very close to DVD quality results with very little outlay of cash in a completely Linux environment, and the results can be quite satisfying. My son has been making videos for his high school classes and I have been digitizing old home videos and it's been quite fun.
There is no consumer-level hardware MPEG2 encoder that will give you the same performance that CCE or TMPGEnc will give you.
Sure, it'll be easier and save you some time. But if you want *quality*, go with a software encoder.
All this makes me wonder what's going to happen to the 4000 PS2's Saddam bought back in '00...
Should we send our boys 4000 copies of GTA:VC?
Original Ananova story
See: http://www.dvdrhelp.com/ http://www.videoguys.com (retailer but has great guides and forum) http://www.radified.com (guides to alot of stuff)
Even ignoring the questionable grammar of this assertion, the concepts behind it are dubious at best.
.FLI or .FLC animations anymore... How long will MPEG4 be supported?
Timeless Format? Ain't no such thing. I have a bunch of "modern" 5.25 floppies, less than 25 years old, and there's no way to get my data from them, for love or money. Try finding someone who can read your 40 MB Syquest cartridges from 1990. Wait five or ten years, and try to read data off of those 3.5 inch floppies.
Oh sure, we say, we'll burn it on a CD or DVD, and we'll *always* be able to read those.
Well, my friends, let me tell you a sad little story. I worked at a company in the early 90s that wanted a data format that would last, and which decided to go with the aforementioned Syquests. The assumption was, of course, that hardware may come and go, but we could always plug the drive into whatever new and fancy machines, and read the old data. Going with an industry standard interface like SCSI would even buffer from unforseen changes like the evolution from ISA to PCI.
Yeah, well, except for a few things... Support in the OS? Well, that seemed to have fallen by the wayside. So, sure, stay with MSDOS on the machine. No problem. Oh, but damn! The heads crashed on one of the drives. Hey, no problem, we had a redundant set, for just that purpose, so we could use one of the drives, while we got another repaired. We did, however, neglect the fact that nobody repairs the damn things. Oh, and media wearing out? Part of the plan was to transfer the data from old catridges to newer ones when the error rate got too high (beware this when you look for long-term CDR storage!). We stockpiled a lot of cartidges, but the failure rate was about 50% higher than estimated back in '90, so we burned through that stack faster than expected.
To make a long story somewhat shorter, even a reasonably well thought out data strategy didn't even last ten years.
Obviously, the installed base for CDRs and DVDs will be much larger than the Syquest market ever was. That buys you some time. Just don't count on them being the 100 year medium. And you probably should worry about data format, as well. Not many players will show
(end of rant)
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
Except if you're using an operating system that has tools flexable enough to allow you to set up a processing pipeline. Capture -> Compressor -> etc. One example of this is Linux.
Use a fifo.
Mad Software: Rantings on Developing So
I got started by reading the excellent guides at doom9.org. They mostly describe how to rip DVDs, but you can also learn a lot about video conversion in the process.
There are also some good tutorials and forum information at the Digital Archive Project and Luke's Video Guide.
The difference is that CDROM is a format that is ubiquitous in the mass market, and Syquest drives are not and have never been. It may eventually happen, but it will be a much longer time before equipment to read CDs is completely unavailable, even after it is no longer a popular format. Media technology that has become ubiquitous will be readable for a longer time because there will sufficient demand to justify products for a longer period of time.
An example is vinyl LPs. Very few consumers have purchased vinyl LPs for more than 15 years, and yet most major consumer electronics stores sell at least a few models of turntable, and common replacement parts like cartriges and needles are still available. There are so many LPs out there that people will still want to play them and these items will probably still be available for many years to come.
As for 5.25" floppies, I still have several 5.25" floppy drives, and I can still plug a them into the floppy controller of a modern PC motherboard and read the disks, assuming the data is still readable.
The main problem is that even CDROMs cannot be archived forever even if the equipment is there to read them. The real answer is to periodically transfer the media to a format that is current every 10 years or so.
Ogg purists will cry about you using MPEG-4 in an OGM, they'll want you to use Theora (the current Ogg video codec, originally based on VP3). It isn't as good, though, but might become a contender - there are some serious changes in the pipeline for it and it may end up being Xiph's "low-end" video codec.
Vorbis is due to get multiple channel coupling support in the encoder. How does great quality 7.1 surround sound in 160kbps or even 144kbps nominal grab you (it'll eat WMA Pro for breakfast, which is just as well considering how broken WMA Pro is as usable codec)? Same bitstream and decoder too, just a feature not yet implemented in the encoder.
And remember, if the next-generation video codec Ogg Tarkin lives up to its targets (and it does stand a chance), when it comes out in around two years, it'll make even XviD look like Microsoft Video 1.
Both of these formats will only be truly happy living in an Ogg Media bitstream, so we will get the OGM advantages of integrated subs, chaptering, possibly XA-Mode2 (800MB on a CD), real metadata (for p2p sharing!) and fast seeking to boot...
And just in time for Bluray coming out into the mainstream, or shortly afterwards, we'll have a complete patent-free codec panoply capable of at least true DVD quality on an 800MB CD rip for literally any movie, and as encoders get better and release group techniques improve (stop transcoding VOBs, get a REAL source and master it!), quality approaching, equalling or possibly even surpassing Bluray on 1 or 2 CD rips!
It's going to rule and will be very hard for even the player manufacturers to ignore.
For interactive stuff, there is CinePaint (Film Gimp). For batch processing, cleanup, filtering, and other video manipulation, there is transcode. Is there any functionality you need that that doesn't cover?
It's all so obvious now!
Why didn't I figure that out? It's just so damn simple when you look at it!
Totally winbloz, totally bogus. Not a peep for us Linux Zealots..
I guess that Linux users don't matter eh??
One thing I've saw is that the article specifies a 40gb hard drive as a minimum. That's laughably small.
If you're working with raw video, it is small. However with MJPEG at 95% quality 40GB would give you about 3 hours at 25fps, full size PAL (figures for NTSC shouldn't be too different, frame rate is higher but image is smaller). The quality loss is insignificant, especially if you're going to later use MPEG1/2/4 or similar compression. I have 30GB partition for capture and can easily fit 2 hours high quality capture on that.
Using Virtualdub for capturing has only one positive side - it's free. I prefer iuVCR, it's not free but worth the price IMHO. Virtualdub is useful only for cleaning, encoding and some effects.
Good SCSI drive or ATA100+ significantly helps keeping frame loss down. Fast CPU is nice too, but not absolutely necessary (though with current prices on Athlon XP... why not?).
The moon is not fully subjugated. I demand a second assault wave preceded by a massive nuclear bombardment.
The only really good reason I can think to not release specs is
embarrassment on just how crappy some hardware out there is, or just how
buggy it is.
-- Chris Wedgwood
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