Hello all! It's great that meetings have started again, sorry I couldn't be there.
Any Linux video experts here? I have loads of video tapes. I have a VHS player, a SCART to USB analogue video input. Both of the above have been true for years and I haven't got around to doing anything about it. What would be the best tools to record the video stream? My objectives: Given that VHS isn't high quality to start with I don't want to lose any quality from the recording, but at the same time I have loads of tapes and don't want huge files resulting from them, so a balance is going to be needed. Many of the tapes will have multiple things on them so some way to split into separate files would be great (probably as a second step so that I still have a single "whole tape" file to work from). Also most will not run to the end of the tape but the player will blindly play all 4h of a 4h tape even if it only has 10 mins of video on it, so recognising that the content has ended would be good. I'm thinking probably something like ffmpeg but I wouldn't have a clue what the best arguments would be. My intention would be to put a tape in, start the recording, press play, walk away. Might be 24h before I return to it - I don't want a 24h recording that is mostly noise! If the end of content can't be detected, then as a minimum I need to be able to set the recording to stop after (say) 4h (although the tapes will vary up to 8h in length so autodetection would be preferred). If I can get through a tape or two a day then it'll still take a month or two to go through everything, but at least they'll be done. Most of the tapes will turn out to have nothing of interest and I'll delete the files and throw the tape. Some will have something of vague interest so I'll keep the file but still throw the tape. Anything important I'll keep both. So the main purpose of this exercise is to whittle a big box of tapes down to a handful and clear some space! Mark -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0344 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER -- Peterboro mailing list Peterboro@mailman.lug.org.uk https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/peterboro
