[mythtv-users] VCR capture recommendation

[Stephen Worthington]

On Fri, 19 Dec 2014 14:38:05 +0100, you wrote:

>Hi All,
>
>I'm looking to transfer some VCR tapes, and possibly capture the
>analogue output of a satellite receiver, both in Australia (PAL-B) and
>the Czech Republic (PAL-DK?).
>
>What would you suggest as a capture device to work with MythTV?
>
>Many thanks,
>Alistair

I am in New Zealand, where the TV and video was PAL-B on VHF and PAL-G
on UHF, so all my old video hardware does PAL.  I still have two
working S-VHS VCRs, and the vastly superior S-Video signal they output
even from normal VHS tapes really helps with getting a good capture. I
made sure when I bought any video capture cards to get ones that have
an S-Video input so I could use the S-VHS VCRs with them.

I have mostly used my Hauppauge HVR-900r2 (USB 2.0 DVB-T and analogue
tuner) on my laptop for doing tape captures.  The HVR-900r2 does not
have a hardware MPEG encoder, but that was fine as encoding to MPEG-2
is not the best choice for capturing video.  Nor is using MythTV - I
just plugged on one of my eSATA or USB3 external hard disks with a
terabyte or two of spare space and copied directly from /dev/video0 to
the external disk.  That records the uncompressed video, typically
around 1.2 Gibytes per minute so you need huge amounts of space.  Then
afterwards I used the usual tools to encode to a top quality 2 pass
H.264 file (using a High at L4.0 profile, IIRC) as the best video
compression format available.

For slightly smaller capture files (around 1 Gibyte per minute), it is
also possible to run the uncompressed video through the Huffy lossless
video codec before writing it to disk.  I used VirtualDub (freeware)
under Windows to use the Huffy codec (also freeware).  VirtualDub also
allows you to see the video as it is recording, so that you can stop
it when you see the end of the recording on the tape, which is very
useful.  And also allows you to edit off any extra frames at the start
or end of your recording.  This was a while ago now, so there may now
be Linux software that will be as good as using VirtualDub, but if you
have Windows box you can use for this, I still think using VirtualDub
would be a good option.

If you have enough space to record the massive files, then most video
capture cards will work to capture uncompressed video.  The quality is
more determined by the quality of the VCR and tape than the video
card, although there are presumably still bad ones around.  I would
really recommend getting a better VCR as your playback device though -
normally VHS VCRs are pretty bad even when working well, and most are
in pretty bad condition these days.

I have also used the Hauppauge PVR-500 in my MythTV box to do
captures, making sure to not use the hardware compression it does. And
when I was out of disk space one time, and I had to capture to
hardware compressed MPEG-2 with the PVR-500, it did a reasonably
decent job using its highest bit rate, but not as good as the proper
uncompressed capture and then H.264 compression.