Analog-digital video capture card, no compression

[arist]

I need to get a video capture card (or device) that will take video from my analog camcorder and convert it to digital (raw DV or AVI) to be saved as a file on my hard drive. It must not compress the video to mpeg format. I don't need a TV tuner. And, of course, it has to have a Linux driver. Does anyone have such a thing in their computer? Any idea how to find one?

[Snowhog]

Re: Analog-digital video capture card, no compression

Linux Box as Digital VCR: A success Story

This is a dated article (2001), but it may provide you with some useful insight.

[arist]

Re: Analog-digital video capture card, no compression

Thanks, but that article presupposes that one already has the conversion device that I seek. I've decided to solve the problem by buying a digital camcorder (Sony HC96) that has analog-to-digital conversion. Kind of an expensive solution, but a nice camcorder is part of the deal.

[Detonate]

Re: Analog-digital video capture card, no compression

I know you said you don't want to do it this way, but I have converted all of my old VHS home movies to digital using a PVR150 and VLC. Sometimes you can find a good TV card on newegg in the open box section or on special. I got mine for about $50.

[arist]

Re: Analog-digital video capture card, no compression

I have the PVR150, and I've been using it with Kino and QDVDAuthor to convert my home movies to DVD. I first have to use ffmpeg to convert the MPEG files to DV in order to edit them, then have Kino reconvert them to MPEG for the DVD. It results in a severe loss of quality. Even if I skip editing and just move the MPEG files that the PVR150 produces straight to DVD, there are bad artifacts in the video when played on a normal TV (they do look OK on the computer with VLC). I would like to have found a way to capture with the PVR150 and get the video to DVD without loss of image quality, but weeks of research turned up nothing. I've been wanting a digital camcorder anyway, so this seemed the best solution.

As someone who has been using Kubuntu very happily for a couple of years, I have to say that trying to do video in Linux has been by far the most frustrating experience in my 30 years of computing.

[Detonate]

Re: Analog-digital video capture card, no compression

I have been doing the same thing. I have experienced no loss of quality. I use VLC to capture the video, then I convert the video to an iso using DeVeDe. I burn the iso to the DVD disk using K3B. It works perfectly with no loss of quality or sync with the audio. The drawback is that it takes a very long time to create the iso. When you capture the video, you can choose in the VLC menu to capture as mpeg. I have had absolutley no problems doing it this way. I recently changed satellite provider from directTV to DishNetwork, and I took the Direct TV DVR and hooked it to my PVR150 and captured all of my saved movies and converted all of them to DVD this way. I have converted all of my old VHS home movies this way. If it can be captured, it can be converted to a DVD that will play on all DVD players.

[arist]

Re: Analog-digital video capture card, no compression

This is a good way to do it. It had never occurred to me to use VLC for capturing (I always use it to watch TV). I just always opened up Konsole and typed

cat /dev/video0 > filename.mpg

The advantage of using VLC is that it has a timer, and it's a little simpler to stop capturing with a mouse click than with Ctrl-C. VLC doesn't have to transcode the video, since the PVR-150 already captures it as MPEG-2: you can just tell VLC to capture it raw. DeVeDe also works well, too, and by fiddling around with its options I finally solved my artifacts problem: the video needs to be deinterlaced. I wouldn't have thought it would make a difference, since the DVD player will just re-interlace the video to display on a standard CRT television, but with deinterlacing camera movement is almost as smooth as on the original tape. I only wasted 4 DVDs before figuring this out, but since everything looks good on the LCD monitor there's no other way than to experiment by burning with different options.

This method still has the drawback that the video can't be edited (the only application for editing MPEG files without conversion that I've found is GOPchop, and for me it either crashes on big files or corrupts small ones). So although the quality problem is solved, I still look forward to the arrival of the camcorder with analog-to-digital pass-through.