Video capture card

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, May 04, 2004 at 02:36:17AM -0400, ed wrote:
> I wouild like to burn all my video tapes
> on to CD's or DVD's. Is it as easy as
> just getting a video capture card?
> I want to retain quality.
> I have an  Athlon 1700 with a 4mb video
> card and on board sound from the k7s5a
> motherboard.
> Also, is it better to burn in AVI or
> MPEG-2 format?

Well MPEG2 is what DVD uses, so at least many people can watch that.
Watching something like Divx (or Xvid) which are MPEG4 style encoders
takes more cpu power (both for encoding and playback) but requries a
fraction of the disk space (and for internet transfers a lot less
bandwidth).  avi format is the most common for storing mpeg4 encoded
video.  Quicktime can do it too I imagine.  Both are simple multiplexed
stream storage formats (and hence tell you nothing about what you need
to view a file with that extension)

I believe MPEG2 you expect about 1GB/hour.  Similar quality MPEG4 (xvid
at least) uses about 350MB.  For your hardware, encoding with mpeg4
should take about 2 hours per 1 hour of video.  Playback seems OK at
about 700 to 800mhz machines.

Look at mencoder (part of mplayer) for a nice encoding program.
transcode is also nice for converting one format to another easily.
Both are avilable for debian from the marillat archives.  Other
distributions should hopefully have packages available somewhere too.

For a capture device, well a quick search found something like:
http://mjpeg.sourceforge.net/driver-zoran/cards.php
which has drivers for some of the Pinacle cards and the iomega buz, and
such.  Those seem to compress with jpeg (mjpeg?) which can then be
converted to something else with transcode or mencoder.

Of course bt878/848 cards are quite well supported (never seen one
myself so I don't know what the quality is like).

Lennart Sorensen
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml