I use a Windows XP PC fitted with a Winfast TV card connected to a VHS
recorder. A Video played via the VHS is captured by a program called
WinDVR3 in 1Gb chunks and saved as MPEG2 (DVD quality) files. These
files can then be edited, shrunk, made into vob's etc, by other
utilities before being burnt onto a DVD.

As this PC can also dual boot into Suse 10.1 / KDE and the TV card is
recognised, working, etc, what software do I need to install to perform
the same video capture as described above?


Bob

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Hello Bob,

Bob Adams wrote:

>
> I use a Windows XP PC fitted with a Winfast TV card connected to a VHS
> recorder. A Video played via the VHS is captured by a program called
> WinDVR3 in 1Gb chunks and saved as MPEG2 (DVD quality) files. These
> files can then be edited, shrunk, made into vob's etc, by other
> utilities before being burnt onto a DVD.

I use mplayer to play videos. It comes with mencoder, a very powerful
converting tool for video data. Google for "mplayer" to find it. There is
also a very user-friendly KDE frontend for mencoder named tabencode. It
closes the gap between the vast variety of options provided by
mplayer/mencoder and the daily needs of a user not (yet) being specialized
on video data formats.

For recording from Composite I use the command-line program "streamer" from
the v4l-tools package. To convert the resulting YUV video stream and WAV
audio stream to a single MPG video, I use mjpegtools. See streamer --help
for details.

To control these commands, I wrote myself a script for recording and another
one for converting, which both can be started and killed by buttons on my
Control Panel ("non-KDE applications").

On my machine the resulting video is MPEG2 format. To catenate multiple
parts of a movie, I use tabencode to convert the sources to MPEG1 before
catenating them quick and dirty with "cat <part1.mpg> <part2.mpg> >
<target.mpg>" or clean with mpgtx, another tool from the web.

To create video DVDs I use dvdstyler which I also got from the web. My
version provides a simple frontend to create a DVD menu. Might be more
powerful by now.

Sounds quite complicated, but it is worth it! :-))

Greetings
Tarper

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In message <egta9u$lr0$03$1@news.t-online.com>, tarper@t-online.de
writes
>Hello Bob,
>
>Bob Adams wrote:
> 
>
>
>For recording from Composite I use the command-line program "streamer" from
>the v4l-tools package. To convert the resulting YUV video stream and WAV
>audio stream to a single MPG video, I use mjpegtools. See streamer --help
>for details.
>
Thanks for that. At least you reassured me that I wasn't being an idiot
because I missed the 'Record' tab in KDETV or some such. :-)

I will give your suggestions a try but it may probably result in keeping
the PC as a dual boot jobby for a while longer.

Bob

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