[mythtv-users] Capturing legacy VHS tapes

[Manuel Lemos]

Hello,

on 10/19/2005 06:54 PM Nick Rout said the following:
>> Well the problem is that I have not found a capture program for Linux 
>> that works with this capture card. A simpler capture program would do if 
>> it worked. MythTV is recommended by the vendor of WIS chip which is what 
>> the card uses and it works. Any other video capture tools that work 
>> (besides command line tools with no preview) would be welcome.
>>
>> I just wanted to make my legacy video captures less burocratic and not 
>> have to create a schedule to extract each chapter in small files that I 
>> could delete once they are moved to DVD. If MythTV cannot work like this 
>> now, I suppose it may not be so hard to improve it. That is why I 
>> wondered if a feature request could be submitted and it would be 
>> implemented soon or later.
>>
>>
> 
> Manuel, I have a hardware mpeg encoding card (Hauppauge) and you can
> simply do:
> 
> cat /dev/video0 > file.mpeg
> 
> In other words it just dumps the output of the card to a file. It works.
> I wonder if it would for your style of card?

I think I am not expressing myself clearly. What you suggest is what I 
am trying to avoid.

The card Linux drivers work well with MythTV but not with other common 
Linux capture software. I can see live TV with MythTV because it 
explicitly supports this card configuration. The only problem is that 
there seems to be no way in MythTV to start and end a recording without 
scheduling it.

The other alternatives suggested by the vendor is to use the command 
line recording tool that comes with the drivers or use Freevo. The 
command line tool works but it is not confortable to use, specially 
because I need to make too many capture from VHS tapes. As for Freevo, I 
simply could not configure it so it can get started. It seems it was 
meant for geeks only.

So, if anybody has any other solution besides command line capture 
tools, I would still appreciate a suggestion.

-- 

Regards,
Manuel Lemos

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