It's Hauppauge HVR-3000 on Gentoo, and it's pretty recently updated Gentoo and pretty stable in performance. Actually it's only when the VHS is not in good shape anymore that the a/v sync is bad. More precisely, the a/v sync is bad in those places when a recording was stopped, and there are intervals of, be it a second or so, or more or less, where the tape is blank proper, that is, not recorded at all in that interval (blue on the screen), or the tape was recorded blank in that interval, as there had been no input to the VHS recorder to record, but the recording went on (black with occasional thin stripes on the screen)... After those places I get the audio lagging somewhere half a second after video, somewhere more than two seconds, and the output file is, in the end, a mess dangerous for my environment to deal with... ;-( But, the same poor VHS (even extremely bad) has no sync problems whatsoever on my M$ Windoze Vista box... Widoze is with Hauppauge HVR-350, but I suppose the composite/S-video input is same hardware as on the Linux box card. Here is the command I used (there are numerous other variants also, none proved to capture properly synced output ): mencoder -fps 25 -ofps 25 -noskip -mc 0 -vf harddup,softskip tv:// -tv input=1:driver=v4l2:device=/dev/video0:normid=3:input=1:alsa:adevice=hw.0:audiorate=48000:amode=1:width=768:height=576 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:autoaspect:vbitrate=8000 -oac mp3lame -srate 48000 -lameopts cbr:preset=standard -endpos 100 -o VHS155_`date +%H%M%S`.avi The "`date +%H%M%S`" in the output file name made it easier to ...more speedily try and try the numerous variants of the command... for later perusal if need be ;-( ... I did search the archives, and I didn't find sufficient info that would apply to my case... Hmmm... This is what MPlayer is saying: mybox # mencoder -fps 25 -ofps 25 -noskip -mc 0 -vf harddup,softskip tv:// -tv input=1:driver=v4l2:device=/dev/video0:normid=3:input=1:alsa:adevice=hw.0:audiorate=48000:amode=1:width=768:height=576 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:autoaspect:vbitrate=8000 -oac mp3lame -srate 48000 -lameopts cbr:preset=standard -endpos 100 -o VHS155_`date +%H%M%S`.avi MEncoder SVN-r29463-4.1.2 (C) 2000-2009 MPlayer Team success: format: 9 data: 0x0 - 0x0 TV file format detected. Selected driver: v4l2 name: Video 4 Linux 2 input author: Martin Olschewski <olschewski at zpr.uni-koeln.de> comment: first try, more to come ;-) Selected device: Hauppauge WinTV-HVR4000 DVB-S/S Tuner cap: STEREO LANG1 LANG2 Tuner rxs: MONO Capabilites: video capture VBI capture device tuner read/write streaming supported norms: 0 = NTSC-M; 1 = NTSC-M-JP; 2 = NTSC-443; 3 = PAL-BG; 4 = PAL-I; 5 = PAL-DK; 6 = PAL-M; 7 = PAL-N; 8 = PAL-Nc; 9 = PAL-60; 10 = SECAM-B; 11 = SECAM-G; 12 = SECAM-H; 13 = SECAM-DK; 14 = SECAM-L; inputs: 0 = Television; 1 = Composite1; 2 = S-Video; Current input: 1 Current format: BGR24 v4l2: current audio mode is : STEREO v4l2: ioctl set format failed: Invalid argument v4l2: ioctl set format failed: Invalid argument [V] filefmt:9 fourcc:0x59565955 size:768x576 fps:25.000 ftime:=0.0400 Input fps will be interpreted as 25.000 instead. ========================================================================== Opening audio decoder: [pcm] Uncompressed PCM audio decoder AUDIO: 48000 Hz, 2 ch, s16le, 1536.0 kbit/100.00% (ratio: 192000->192000) Selected audio codec: [pcm] afm: pcm (Uncompressed PCM) ========================================================================== Opening video filter: [expand osd=1] Expand: -1 x -1, -1 ; -1, osd: 1, aspect: 0.000000, round: 1 Opening video filter: [softskip] Opening video filter: [harddup] ========================================================================== Opening video decoder: [raw] RAW Uncompressed Video VDec: vo config request - 768 x 576 (preferred colorspace: Packed UYVY) Could not find matching colorspace - retrying with -vf scale... Opening video filter: [scale] VDec: using Packed UYVY as output csp (no 0) Movie-Aspect is undefined - no prescaling applied. [swscaler @ 0x1e46890]using unscaled uyvy422 -> yuv420p special converter videocodec: libavcodec (768x576 fourcc=34504d46 [FMP4]) Selected video codec: [rawuyvy] vfm: raw (RAW UYVY) ========================================================================== MP3 audio selected. Forcing audio preload to 0, max pts correction to 0. Writing header...1f ( 0%) 0.00fps Trem: 0min 0mb A-V:0.000 [0:0] ODML: vprp aspect is 4:3. Writing header... ODML: vprp aspect is 4:3. ^CPos: 633.9s 15847f ( 0%) 24.80fps Trem: 0min 0mb A-V:0.000 [8000:137] Flushing video frames. Writing index... Writing header... ODML: vprp aspect is 4:3. Video stream: 8000.773 kbit/s (1000096 B/s) size: 633941268 bytes 633.880 secs 15847 frames Audio stream: 137.910 kbit/s (17238 B/s) size: 10926624 bytes 633.840 secs v4l2: 15848 frames successfully processed, 124 frames dropped. mybox # I use "alsa:adevice=hw.0" in the command, as the Connexant audio capture on the card itself would be "alsa:adevice=hw.1" instead, but there was no way in the world to get that one to capture properly on that input... It was impure sound, screechy and hardly intelligible most of the time... Took me trials galore to figure out that I could get the sound right at all on my card... Except, that is, when there are those ugly passages described above... Other than for this a/v sync issue, the output quality that I get with MPlayer on Gentoo is superior to what I get on Windoze (taken it's the same hardware with regard to the composite input). Anyone had similar issues? Surely someone out there did have! And how did you, kind reader who did so, solve this a/v sync hair tearing frustration? Arrrgh...
