On Tue, Apr 6, 2010 at 10:41 AM, Rolf Ernst <rolf.ernst at silverlightning.org>wrote: > On 4/6/2010 12:11 PM, S Andreason wrote: > >> Josef Wolf wrote: >> >>> I am about to digitize my VHS tapes. Since this are old family >>> recordings, I'd >>> like to have the best quality I can get. >>> >>> >> Just my 2 (cents/pence/peso/yen) worth: I did the same thing as you (except to NTSC), and had a lot of problems with the audio keeping in sync with the video. Essentially, the sync kept drifting farther apart as I recorded more. This was/is a known problem. I was given this link: http://lists.mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/mencoder-users/2009-November/010945.html which explained these things, and, finally, problem solved. (FWIW: I found that just stopping - not killing - the capture process when you have enough, then running the re-indexing works just the same as letting the capture continue running. As for the dropped/duplicate frames: I found that trying -noskip or -vf harddup to get rid of those actually caused the audio to go out of sync again. So I just ignored the messages. But, if you get something like "video buffer full" then your capturing video too fast and without enough system cache space (note: not mencoder cache!). If this happens then you can get worried, because you are actually losing real data. As for the format to convert to "on-the-fly": that really depends on your machine. If you get the problem above, switch to an encoder that needs less cpu, then re-encode to your desired format. Note that capturing to raw audio/video data will generate too much data for disk i/o too handle, and you will get the above error again. Finally, one unspoken (unposted) caveat: due to the nature of the VHS playback, you will probably get damaged or corrupted frames that will usually show up in a video editor. I use cinelerra, and it would crash, or simply not load the video, when it found these. Avidemx has a good (but not perfect) filter to get rid of those. Okay, so this was far more than 2 monetary units worth. But just giving you the benefit of many exasperating days of trial and error. Good luck. ken
