[mythtv-users] VCR capture recommendation

Alistair Grant akgrant0710 at gmail.com
Tue Dec 23 16:41:18 UTC 2014


On Sat, Dec 20, 2014 at 2:50 AM, Stephen Worthington
<stephen_agent at jsw.gen.nz> wrote:
> 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.

Thanks to everyone for their feedback.  Based on everything I've read,
it looks like the Hauppauge USB-Live2 will best suit my needs at the
moment.

Thanks again,
Alistair


More information about the mythtv-users mailing list