On Thu, 7 Nov 2013 14:22:58 +0100 "M. Fioretti" <mfioretti@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > What Fedora-compatible video capture hardware should I buy to hook VHS > players, Firewire camcorders... to my computer? For VHS, you want to get a TV card. Lookup "video4linux" documentation (usually called v4l) to find out what chipsets are supported by the Linux kernel --- before you buy the hardware. Also, in case of TV cards, hardware quality is usually proportional to its price. Another thing that I can recommend is to ask someone else to do it for you --- there are professional/commercial mini-studios that can convert your VHS to some digital format (usually to DVD), for a small price. Typically they own the hardware do it with better quality than you could do it yourself. As for firewire, AFAIK this already comes in a digital format. This means that the capture software and hardware do not need to do analog-to-digital conversion, the data already comes in digital. In addition to the recording/capture software, you just need a camcorder to playback the tape through the firewire, and you need to have a firewire port in your computer. If you don't have one, any firewire PCI card will do the job. Depending on your camcorder, the firewire data may come in the raw, uncompressed DV format. You want to have *a* *lot* of hard disk space for that. I vaguely remember needing tens of GB per hour of tape. After you have the file on your hard drive, you can transcode it to some format of reasonable size, and play around with various compression levels, quality settings, etc. > what tools do you recommend (command-line stuff is OK) for grabbing > the video from that hardware, transcoding and saving to disk only > specified parts automatically (meaning connect the VHS player, then > tell Fedora "save by yourself only the first 5:30 minutes, then from > minute 40:20 to 43:10, of the incoming video") I know that mplayer/mencoder can do this, if you are not afraid of reading the mammoth man page and finding the relevant command-line options. :-) However, my usual recommendation is --- grab the whole tape to a file first, and then cut out unneeded pieces from the digital version. You'll have far greater control of the positions of the cuts than you would have if you would capture time-based pieces. That way you'll also avoid potential A/V sync issues, etc... HTH, :-) Marko -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines Have a question? Ask away: http://ask.fedoraproject.org
