video card, dvd/vcd

[Preston Boyington]

I am thinking about buying an all-in-wonder card to convert some old vhs
tapes to vcd/dvd. I would like some suggestions/experiences from the group
for software or hardware.

I don't care if it is command line or gui, I just want good results (baby's
first birthday, etc.). I wouldn't mind being able to mix some ogg files
into the video and insert titles/graphics.

Suggestions?
Preston

[Nicos Gollan]

On Thursday 31 July 2003 16:38, Preston Boyington wrote:

> I am thinking about buying an all-in-wonder card to convert some old vhs
> tapes to vcd/dvd. I would like some suggestions/experiences from the group
> for software or hardware.

For grabbing, you can use xawtv with about any TV card supported by the kernel
(V4L). Cards with the BT878 and a stereo decoder (the cheap ones don't have
one, so watch out) are pretty well supported in the 2.4.x kernels. The 2.6
kernel seems to have support for the "new standard" Philips SAA7134 chip
which does stereo. I'd recommend you get a separate TV card for that purpose
since most integrated graphics/tuner-cards are not supported.

There are also many USB boxes which take an SVideo input and generate an MPEG2
stream on the fly, but those have several problems.

You should be aware that encoding from VHS source material is a bad thing
since the inherent picture noise drives most codecs insane. Get a still grab
from your source material and you'll see what I mean.

For encoding, transcode might be a good tool since it supports deinterlacing,
several filters that might get rid of noise and has a special optimization
for keeping NTSC audio in sync (if you have NTSC source).

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