next step: what's the best capture utility?

[spankmeister7]

I want to convert a bunch of video I have on VHS to DVD. Today I finally got XawTV working. It looks super for watching video, but capture absolutely refuses to work properly. I've monkied a bit with Zapper but it's quite buggy for me. So ideally I want to use MPEG-2 since it'll be right off to another mechanism for DVD. That probably entails capturing to some sort of AVI and then encoding it into MPEG-2. If so, which codecs?

I'm also toying with the idea of getting a Canopus ADVC-100 composite->fireware device and then just using Kino for the whole thing.

Any thoughts?

Thanks,
Marcus

[FishB8]

You could try digging around more and seeing if you can get XawTV capture working properly. Also check out the MJPEG Tools (http://mjpeg.sourceforge.net/) website. It supposedly works with XawTV for encoding a MJPEG AVI. If you get that to work, you could then encode to just about whatever format you want.

The composite->firewire may save you a whole lot of trouble. The success of analog capture devices on Linux is totally dependent on the amount of built in support for your specific hardware. If it's not working, it may never get fixed since most Linux folks have dumped the crankey analog capture devices in favor of the growing popularity in digital formats that allow for the use of DV over firewire. It's a lot less messy and easier to deal with.

[abatis]

Maybe this is not the way but since I have the equipment I do it. I copy my VHS tape onto my sony digital camcorder. I than use the firewire connect to download with dvdgrabber and kimo. Works fine.

[spankmeister7]

Okay. I've been chatting with people from both SF mpjeg-users and marvel-users and found that the Matrox G400-TV drivers supplied with mgadrivers 0.1.x cannot simultaneously record and view video with the embedded hardware. Linux Video Studio (the neat gui front end to mjpegtools) requires your hardware to do this, so the G400 is out for use with LVS because of the driver limitation. Note that: driver limitation, not a hardware limitation. However, using lavrec at the command line works perfectly for capturing video. I find that glav is too simplistic, and you cannot que up edits. It's also difficult to pin down exact frames for cutting. Cinelerra is too buggy and has issues with AVI files it *thinks* are quicktime AVIs but aren't, and LVS can't be made to run without loading the capture port.

So now I have clean (but clunky) capture by queing up video with XawTV and recording with lavrec, but editing remains an issue. I'll keep poking around to see if there is some good, happy, clean video editing software - something like Kino but for mjpeg instead of DV - and keep any one who cares posted.

I'm half-ready to buy that Canopus ADVC-100 just to avoid all this, but I really love my G400-TV. I'd hate to spend $300 to just to get around a driver limitation. Oy.

tah,
Marcus

[Joe999]

I use NuppelVideo (http://frost.htu.tuwien.ac.at/~roman/nuppelvideo/), for my captures, using an ati tvwonder. I've been extreamly happy to find that I'm actually getting far better performance in Linux than I was getting in windows with ati's software and drivers. It's command line based, but not very hard to get used to. For vhs recording, I use
nuvrec -n -T -S1 filename
and everything comes out great. After recording, I use avidemux (http://fixounet.free.fr/avidemux/) to edit out commercials, clean up the vhs noise a little, and then encode the video to xvid or ffmpeg's mpeg4 codec.

[spankmeister7]

Hmm. I installed avidemux this morning without any problems. Still having problems, though.

Avidemux opens up just fine but I can't open the avi I just made using lavrec. It acts like its going to open the file (actually a string of 15 2-gig files) and seems to index for about 3-4 minutes, but then it cannot play or show the video at all giving me only an error along the lines of having a problem decompressing the frames.

The avidemux readme said this might happen if I have the wrong codec installed. That would make sense. But I'm not totally sure what to do about it. Is it that avidemux needs its own mjpeg decoder?

[mean]

For mjpeg you need mjpegtools installed (the mjpeg codec is in mjpegtools)

After installing + the relevant -dev package if needed
./configure --disable-warnings
make

And it should be fine

You can also try CTRL+I to see what codec might be needed

[spankmeister7]

mjpegtools are already installed. I can't use lavrec without since its a part of mjpegtools. I recompiled avidemux this time like so:

./configure --disable-warnings

as you suggested. Still no mjpeg. After the file opens I'm presented with a little window that says "Problem decompressing frame" as before.

The output from the console is as follows:

*** working ***

Riff file detected...
AVI file detected...
AVI file /video/record01.avi opened
Filesize : 1824036138 (0x6cb8952a)

at: 0x00000020 hdrlavih size : 56
at: 0x0000006c strlstrh size : 64
at: 0x000000b4 strlstrf size : 40
at: 0x000000f0 strlstrh size : 64
at: 0x00000138 strlstrf size : 16
Got them all... skipping...

Main header read
______________

Reading first stream information

Reading second stream information

Audio strf : 16 (wav 16)
HAS INDEX
Offset : 00000020, size : 00000038 fcc:hdrlavih
Offset : 0000006c, size : 00000040 fcc:strlstrh
Offset : 000000b4, size : 00000028 fcc:strlstrf
Offset : 000000f0, size : 00000040 fcc:strlstrh
Offset : 00000138, size : 00000010 fcc:strlstrf
Offset : 00000808, size : 0001d4ae fcc:movi00db
Offset : 6cb27d82, size : 000617b0 fcc:moviidx1
Selected audio stream :01wbIndexing

Delta : 8
sync : 2048
abs : 2048
video chunk :00014521 audio chunk :00010434
Warning no fcc, trying bih one...

Merging index

Audio codec: WAV

Audio streamer initialized
Total audio length : 42734430
Main avi header :

dwStreams: :2
dwMicroSecPerFrame: :33367
dwMaxBytesPerSec: :10000000
dwPaddingGranularity: :0
dwFlags: :65584
dwTotalFrames: :14521
dwInitialFrames: :0
dwWidth: :720
dwHeight: :480

Max Audio chunk size : 4096
Max Video chunk size : 147667
video stream attached:
______________________

VideoHeader Len: 40 (40)
Extra Data : 0
fccType :vids
fccHandler :MJPG
dwFlags: :0
dwInitialFrames: :0
dwRate: :1000000
dwStart: :0
dwSampleSize: :0
dwScale: :33367
dwLength: :14521
dwQuality: :-1
dwSampleSize: :0
biSize: :40
biWidth: :720
biHeight: :480
biBitCount: :24
biCompression: :1196444237
biSizeImage: :345600
biXPelsPerMeter: :0
biYPelsPerMeter: :0
biClrUsed: :0
audio stream attached:
______________________

fccType :auds
fccHandler :
fccHandler :0x0
dwFlags: :0
dwInitialFrames: :0
dwRate: :88200
dwScale: :2
dwStart: :0
dwLength: :21367215
dwSuggestedBufferSize: :0
dwQuality: :-1
dwSampleSize: :2
WavHeader Len: 16 (16)
0000 : ....D..X...... 01 00 01 00 44 ac 00 00 88 58 01 00 02 00 10 00
encoding: :1
channels: :1
frequency: :44100
byterate: :88200
blockalign: :2
bitspersample: :16
*** audio found (1) ***

*** audio found (2) ***

Decoder FCC: MJPG
using invalid codec for
MJPG
Audio streamer initialized
Audio codec: WAV

[lemon]

> mjpegtools are already installed. I can't use lavrec without since its a part of mjpegtools

You don't need the mjpegtools-dev packages to use lavrec, you only need mjpegtools. But you need it to compile programs that use its codec. Are you sure it is installed?


> I recompiled avidemux this time like so: ./configure --disable-warnings

Well, you should never disable warnings, specially when you have a problem, you need all the information that is possible.
Run configure again, without this --disable-warnings, and look what it says.
At the end it will give some information:

checking /usr/local/ is full of divx... "yes"
DivX codec : yes
Divx5 ? : yes
Xvid Codec : no
Mjpeg : no
Mpeg 1 & 2(libmpeg2): yes
Mad decoder : yes
OSS : yes
Xv(overlay) : yes
Lame : yes
Ogg Vorbis : yes
A52/AC3 : no
FFMPEG : yes
ARTS : yes
FreeType : yes
XML2 : yes

I have mjpegtools installed, and I use lavrec, but, I have not mjpegtools-dev installed, so mjpeg support will not be enabled in my avidemux.