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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."
iLife.
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?
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!
2. Export .vcr file to mpeg2 (ATI likes capturing in it's own format better).
You'll wind up with better output if you can capture in something that's not compressed in a lossy format (like, for example, ATI's VCR format.) huffyuv makes an excellent on-the-fly compressor, though of course ATI's software won't let you use it.
3. Run mpg file through FlaskMPEG to convert to DivX video with MP3 audio.
You'll wind up with even better output if you don't go from one lossy compressor to another lossy compressor to yet a third lossy compressor.
I've been using VirtualDub with my ATI All-in-wonder and things are coming up pretty well so far. You have to jump through a number of hoops to get there-- ATI ships with WDM, but VitualDub wants VFW, so you need a wrapper to get there...
Watch it, dude, you're spreading bad information.
huffyuv makes an excellent on-the-fly compressor, though of course ATI's software won't let you use it.
Actually the most recent version of the software lets you choose your AVI codec, assuming it's installed on your system. I routinely capture in HuffYUV to my 80gig RAID drive. Of course, I convert shortly thereafter.
You'll wind up with even better output if you don't go from one lossy compressor to another lossy compressor to yet a third lossy compressor.
Depends entirely upon the bitrates used. Use a high enough bitrate of mpeg2 (say, 8mbps) your "quality bottleneck" is usually going to be the quality of the source (cable, DSS, whatever). For the first time. Of course, if you go through enough reencodes, it will get worse.
I like ATI's software because it's easy to use. VirtualDub isn't made to watch TV, and without addons/plugins, it's not made for timed records.
They could link to Linux-mentioning articles *as well as* rather than *instead of* the Windows articles, but if it comes down to a choice of a story about one or the other I think a Linux article would make more interesting reading. And Slashdot does have limited space (there are far more story submissions than ever appear on the front page) so this situation is quite likely.
It's not so much OS fascism as the fact that an article saying 'click here, click there, download that' is rather dull. A Linux article has the additional spin of interviewing 'Roberto Campari, lead developer of the free Videotromatic package' or whatever, and explaining the technical developments in more depth. And it can explain how to write a shell script to partly automate the task of tweaking volume levels, or stuff like that. Unix just makes for better literature than Windows.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
So was DivX 3 ;-)
And DivX 4
Now nobody uses DivX 4. It's either XviD or DivX 5.
Times change.
Doing the Right Thing should not be preempted by making a buck.