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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."
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
> 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
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.
I don't like Macs and I have to agree whole-heartedly. I've done video capture on a Mac and if it got any easier it would do it itself. On the PC platform, things get much more complex.
Working with Pinnacle on Winxp, I ran in to some DV capture issues. The tech support rep sent me a "Things to try" document with over 200 bullet items ranging from the obvious, reinstall the firewire card to the time-consuming reinstall the OS to the head scratching "disable font-smoothing". Ultimately, I built a dedicated video machine that works fine and never determined the real problem.
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