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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."
We bring you the 1st part of the Ars Technica Guide to p0rn^H^H^H^HVideo Capturing, Cleaning, and Compression.
I agree!! Why don't they cover OS X and Linux. Maybe it is because they are only 5% of the market, but I would bet that they are a larger part of the video capture crowd. People see Tivo and think they can do it themselves under Linux and a guide to show them how to that would be interesting, since one can develop for free under Linux. I wonder how many people are into video capture under Linux. I bet that percentage is around 20-30% of the video capture audience.
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.
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?
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
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!
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...
If you add firewire and use an external capture device (like a DV camera or DV bridge) you can do quite a bit with an older processor. However, any video editing you attempt will be slow and painful. If I use my XP 2000+ to edit things go fast enough to not make it bothersome, but rendering can still take awhile. I've also used my wife's dual G4 and while it isn't any faster, the OS and software is so much better to work with, you wouldn't believe it.
Personally, I'd prefer Linux to finish polishing the end user experience for Office and Desktop Publishing software (because that's what I use most) before getting into the video editing relm.
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
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
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.
"The words of the prophets are written on the Slashdot walls."
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.
Yes, you can get a capture card cheaper ... but it requires there be working drivers for not only the system you run now, but the one you run in a couple years.
The Canopus ADVC100 (which I own) or the other "bridge" type products require no drivers other your computer having a working Firewire setup the same as you'd have with a DV cam.
--
BTW. These products are not TV tuner cards. They only convert an input video source. If you want TV capture, they're not the right solution.
"Hey, I'm a complete moron who, in between late-night one-handed surfing sessions, likes to make inane and ignorant slashdot posts bashing anyone with the initiative to make a contribution to the online tech community. I didn't actually read the article, so I wouldn't know that it was put together by a group of volunteers who donated their time and effort so that people like me can have easy access to technical information."
"Oh, by the way, I also have no clue about Ars in general, so I wouldn't know that the entire site (with the exception of the forums) runs on a single server, and that the guys who own it, run it, and contribute to it have day jobs in order to support themselves so that they can spend their precious free time creating high-quality web content that they give away for free. I would get a life, but it's just too easy to sit back and fire off a cynical post to Slashdot, hoping someone will mod me up and I'll have my very own flaccid little moment of poseur fame--a moment that, unlike the folks who contributed to the article I'm bashing, I didn't actually have to do any work for. "
Senior CPU Editor | Ars Technica | http://arstechnica.com/
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.
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.
Not sure about XP, but in 2K, you can disable font-smoothing by going to the Display Properties control panel, selecting the Effects tab, and deselect "Smooth Edges of Screen Fonts".
And if you didn't know how to do this, it's all explained in the handy-dandy HELP SYSTEM (Start menu, Help). Just open it, go to the index, and type in "smothing fonts". You don't even have to type it all in... it'll find it after the "smo".
Why do people who always read man pages and README files in Linux never think to do the equivalent in Windows?
It's always a long day... 86400 doesn't fit into a short.
Perhaps some research into the sync problem might be useful?
ffmpeg is very good, but its sync is not.
Transcode with nvrec or mencoder/mplayer are the two best ways of recording TV on linux with sync.
I have about 50 films recorded perfectly using mencoder and the ffmpeg codecs.
http://blog.grcm.net/
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.
I don't know any good guide on how to do this, but using MPlayer under Linux you "just" issue the following command:
mencoder -tv on:driver=v4l:input=1:width=640:height=480:adevice =/dev/dsp:amode=0 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4 -oac mp3lame -lameopts abr:br=128 -o myvideo.avi
with the correct video capture device loaded (e.g. bttv), video cable plugged to the video input, sound cable to the soundcard, and you obtain a 640x480 DivX with MP3 stereo audio, on the fly, using a 600MHz+ machine :-)