LWN: Comments on "The Grumpy Editor's video journey, part 1"

$50 will get you a used TiVo on ebay

dlang — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 04:44:50 +0000

if you are on cable it will work as before.

if you are on an antenna you need a converter box.

the tivo has the ability to control an external converter box (it can be configured to do so with a cable or satellite converter, this would work the same way)

$50 will get you a used TiVo on ebay

garymey — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 04:40:32 +0000

I have used a TIVO series 2 with an OTA for the Oscar show parties for the past two years. We stop during commercials for costume contests, music, etc and then can start without missing any of the show. We use a video projector.

When the switch happens in Feb, what problems will we face. Is there a certain converter box we should get? Will the TIVO no longer work with OTA?

The Grumpy Editor's video journey, part 1

thierryg — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 10:14:05 +0000

I have used a Hauppage HVR-1110 (DVB-T and analog hybrid), with one of the TV viewer software
(xdtv?).
Connect VCR to composite in and soundcard audio in. Start the viewer, select composite in,
start the VCR, select recording options on xdtv, start recording... The main problem is the
need to be able to do real-time encoding and certain file formats limitations (for example,
avi files are limited to 4GB).

The Grumpy Editor's video journey, part 1

pointwood — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 11:53:03 +0000

Thanks a lot for this article, I really look forward to the other parts. I have been looking
into video capturing and editing under Linux and as you wrote, the complexity is way too big.

The Grumpy Editor's video journey, part 1

leoc — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 19:41:07 +0000

I use a Plextor M402U which is an external USB attached device that has SVHS and audio in, and has GPL'd V4L2 drivers. I bought it a few years ago to use with MythTV and it works great, captures DivX natively. The only downside is that you have to patch your kernel because the drivers are not mainline yet. There's also a version with a built in tuner if you have cable.

Reasonable defaults

KotH — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 11:10:39 +0000

There are tons of sites on MEncoder (and MPlayer) just use google
to find them. And if you don't want to read them, you can use one
of the hundreds of the front ends to MPlayer and MEncoder most of
which are listed on the MPlayer homepage (http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/projects.html).

BTW: MPlayer and MEncoder are written with a capital second letter.

Reasonable defaults

stefanor — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 19:59:53 +0000

I agree about mencoder being able to do almost anything. I learned to use it from using
mplayer, and I think that's the best way to approach it. The options are reasonably straight
forward (most of the time).

I find mencoder to be more capable than transcode / gstreamer / vlc, but none of them can do
everything, and most of them I don't know them quite well enough...

Analog -> IEEE 1394

stefanor — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 19:51:03 +0000

Sony's DV decks maybe what you are thinking of. But they generally cost more than cameras :-)

Another option would be to...

dlang — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 21:42:24 +0000

but the rest of the conversation is how to get from analog recorded vidow, not from film.

doing a freeze frame on videotape is not practical.

Another option would be to...

jd — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 13:48:24 +0000

Not quite, though I didn't spell out what would be done. My fault there, sorry. The idea is to
step a single frame at a time in the movie projector, and capture that frame as though it was
a single still. It doesn't matter whether it's direct or a reflected image. You'd use an image
captre device, like a monochrome CCD, but since we're not playing the frames at regular speed,
the capture device can operate much slower and capture much more detail. The capture device
also wants to be as far from the projector as produces more useful detail.
<p>
(This eliminates blur, allows you to get all of the detail of the frame, etc.)
<p>
If it takes 1 second to capture a still at such high resolution, you simply forward to the
next frame about once a second, and each frame becomes photographable. (The BBC used similar
techniques to produce production stills from camera footage.)
<p>
You do this once with red only light from the camera, then again with only green light, and
finally with blue light. Hence the use of a monochrome CCD. You get a higher resolution
capture, but also by blending the images, you end up with HDR stills. Not sure if there is an
animated version of OpenEXR, but there is a version of MPEG specifically for HDR. You then use
that to convert the stills into a movie.
<p>
I'm probably still skipping details, but it's a variant on how they "clean" analog movies
(which is done frame-by-frame) and then use those stills to rebuild a full movie, originally
also on tape (so they had to burn a single frame onto a single celluloid window, with very
high accuracy).

Another option would be to...

njs — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 10:34:29 +0000

Sorry, what are you talking about?  Taking the raw analog tape out of the video and laying it
down on a flat-bed scanner (which makes no sense), or... what?

Another option would be to...

jd — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 18:47:35 +0000

...regard the analog medium as simply a collection of stills. Scanning in a time series of still images is much much easier in Linux. You even have the added benefit that if you rescan the same still using red, green and blue, there are packages for stitching such images together into a single high dynamic range image, which may be closer to what was originally on the analog medium.

Next up, if there is a sound track, you record that. It's kept separate from the images, at this point you only care that both are time sequenced.

You then thread the time-sequenced stills and the sound into a single movie, where the inputs are scaled to an equal length in time, hopefully but not necessarily linearly. That's the hard part. When you record the sound, the slice of sound for a given frame must be shown at the same time as that frame. The painfully bad sync on some YouTube videos, where the individuals involved aren't doing anything nearly as sophisticated as what I'm outlining, shows that this is not an easy thing to do.

You now (hopefully) have something that accurately reproduces the movies, is likely superior to something Linux' video input can do (because you produced multiple samples of the images and that can't be done in software alone in most cases), requires much simpler drivers (the graphics aren't sampled in hard real-time and aren't obtained from high-speed video capturing hardware), and will probably cause far less damage to the hair follicles.

If the series doesn't already cover such approaches, then maybe it might be worth adding something on non-traditional video capture methods - in this case, using the fact that video is really no different than animation via flicking through pages in a book.

The Grumpy Editor's video journey, part 1

ogj — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 08:26:36 +0000

What to do if all I have is a laptop (with USB and firewire)? I guess I'll need an external
box of some kind then? Any suggestions?
I have a few Hi8 tapes. What resolution do they correspond to?
Very nice (and entertaining!) article, btw.

PVR-250

giraffedata — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 02:00:16 +0000

I did a lot of research into this question before I bought a PVR-250, which I have been using with IVTV for a while now. I recommend the PVR-250. It is the standard, in that it's what everybody else is using, which means lots of people have blazed the trail for you.

But it also costs more.

$50 will get you a used TiVo on ebay

giraffedata — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 01:48:07 +0000

Beware that Jan 2009, NTSC broadcast will be interrupted, that TiVo may not be valuable for anything else after that

It will still be useful for cable TV, which the majority of US analog televisions connect to today (probably more then), and outside of the US.

BTW, it's February 17, 2009.

v4l2ucp

ncm — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 23:43:56 +0000

Is "v4l2ucp -- A universal control panel for v4l2 devices" of any value for this sort of
thing?

The Grumpy Editor's video journey, part 1

tack — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 17:31:47 +0000

And with recent flash now supporting h264, online video sucks 40% less.

Analog -> IEEE 1394

bracher — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 17:13:32 +0000

Another possibility is a "media bridge".  Essentially that digital camcorder minus the optics.
Video (composite or svideo) and stereo audio come in one side, dv output over firewire on the
other.  The one I have at home seems to branded as "Dazzle", but I seem to remember Sony
making them as well.

Of course, that's a new piece of hardware, and our Grumpy Editor already has the Hauppauge
card...

- mark

$50 will get you a used TiVo on ebay

martinfick — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 17:00:22 +0000

$50 will get you a used TiVo on ebay. With this and a little hacking to get you the analog
input as a channel you can record your data easily from any analog source. (You could do it
without hacking too, but it's not as clean and easy.)

The nice part is that with a little more hacking (installing TivoWeb,) you can even give it a
title and leave it available in a convenient list of other video material accessible easily
from the TiVo remote to play directly on your TV. No PC, no monitor, watch it from the
convenience of your couch.

A little more hacking (mfs_ftp, ffmpeg) and you can extract it and convert it to many other
formats for web viewing, emailing to grandparents, saving to DVD...

$50 more for an ethernet card (turbonet) will make these tasks much quicker (especially the
extracting).

Lastly since that $50 TiVo probably has limited storage (+-30GB,) you can spend ~$100 and drop
in a 500GB drive. Or, if you already have plenty of space on your PC, stream extra storage
there.

This may not be quite the same quality as other solutions, but if you are recording VHS or
8mm, the TiVo mpeg1 is probably already better quality (at BEST resolution) than the source.
Compression may not be quite as good, but it really won't make that much of a difference with a
500GB drive, soon you will wonder why you bothered trying to get every extra KB of
compression.

It really is a quite convenient method which is something even the non-techies in the
household can do once you have it setup (well, as long as they can program a VCR.)

-Martin

Beware that Jan 2009, NTSC broadcast will be interrupted, that TiVo may not be valuable for
anything else after that (not a problem if you use it just for what I mentioned above.)

The Grumpy Editor's video journey, part 1

thoffman — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 16:30:27 +0000

Thanks for tackling this project!  

I was just thinking that it was long past time for me to convert our analog SVHS wedding
videos into something more... digital.  Then the VCR can go to the garage sale.

However, I do not yet have any kind of capture card.  Hmm, except maybe an ATI All-In-Wonder
7500 in a box somewhere?  Must look.  And one of those HDTV-PC Linux-only cards, but I don't
think it does analog capture at all.  

So my question is:  Should I buy a "Hauppauge WinTV PVR-250" and safely follow in the trail
our fearless editor has blazed?

Or is there a different card, available inexpensively (second hand on EBay) which would
capture analog video well, and perhaps support the V4L2 streaming mode?

Suggestions would be appreciated!

The Grumpy Editor's video journey, part 1

drfickle — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 15:30:38 +0000

Jon, I have the exact same problem and have been putting it off for years. I GREATLY
appreciate reading about your experience as I'd rather put my free time to a more fruitful
use. Maybe I will have to just buy/build a MythTV box some day. The last time I looked at
paying someone to transfer the video I began a coughing fit.

Reasonable defaults

tnoo — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 15:08:18 +0000

No doubt that mencoder is a great tool. One would only wish to have some 
command line switches, or ready-made scripts, for common tasks, like 
animating a series of images, or re-encoding a video, that can be played 
on the default Windows Media Player on my mothers computer. 

If someone knows about a "Mencoder for Dummies" site, please post it 
here.

The Grumpy Editor's video journey, part 1

stevan — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 11:34:00 +0000

I /think/ (but I'm not sure) that kaffeine will record from any video source it can use, and
it can use a PVR-250 card.  It's possible that the good old standby vlc also does this.

S

availability of v4l2-ctl

smurf — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 11:33:45 +0000

With Ubuntu Gutsy this is as easy as

    sudo aptitude install ivtv-utils

or your local GUI equivalent.

The fun thing here is that, these days, the shell actually has a hook that *tells* you what to
install when you type a command it can't find in its path.

The Grumpy Editor's video journey, part 1

drag — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 09:13:15 +0000

It's probably more accurate to say 'mencoder reflects the complexity of digital video' rather
then just saying the tool is complicated.

It's not easy stuff. There are a lot of choices you need to make between quality and
performance and trade-offs are a natural part of everything. 

Linux tools like Mencoder or Transcoder are going to be what you need to get the best out of
your encodings. The best quality for the smallest files.. this is what their game is about. 

Otherwise you have two choices... Either take generic defaults and sacrifice quality for
usability or have very large files and throw hardware/storage at the problem. 

Cheap, Easy, Quality: Pick two.

IEEE 1394 is nice, but...

khim — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 06:39:30 +0000

It was quite a struggle to get video out of IEEE 1394 camera under Linux too. Sure, tools come with your distribution - but they just don't work! Under Mac everything just works and under Windows you need to download executable and tun it. No need to search for strange stuff on livna, no need to compare pluses and minuses of different modes: just plug camera in, hit "capture" and get the stupid .avi file!

Editing under Linux is not so bad - though I'm yet to see any editor where I can look at 4-5 synchronized captures from few cameras and choose fragments - but that functionality is probably considered too advanced for amateurs (even if it existed 50 years ago) so I'll settle for what is available...

The Grumpy Editor's video journey, part 1

ruin8tr — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 05:59:05 +0000

"Now it's just a matter of bashing all of that data into a useful form for grandparental distribution - a process which looks like it might just take a bit of time."

For web-enabled grandparents, I recommend exporting flv from kino and serving it up with flowplayer.

Analog -> IEEE 1394

brugolsky — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 04:32:12 +0000

IIRC, my handheld camcorder provides the ability to connect an analog input, and pass the
captured video through to the IEEE 1394 port.  I used dvgrab, kino, and transcode a number of
years ago to massage some vacation video, and was generally pleased with the results.

The Grumpy Editor's video journey, part 1

jwb — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 03:56:51 +0000

Did the editor consider using gstreamer?  gstreamer has all manner of command line abilities
and I find it suited to this type of task.  A starting point would be:

gst-launch v4l2src ! filesink location=out.mpg

Although you could insert more nodes in that pipeline to compress the video, or other
operations.

The Grumpy Editor's video journey, part 1

vmlinuz — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 03:46:59 +0000

I think you are unfair in your comments on mencoder. As you say, it is perfectly capable of doing all sorts of weird and wonderful things - and the documentation is sorely lacking in reasons why you might want to do such things - but if all you want to do is copy a video (or stream) from one place to another, a command-line like:
mencoder -tv driver=v4l -oac copy -ovc copy -o priceless-video-data.avi tv://
should get you something similar to the cp example given, except for the slightly odd result of having an MPEG stream embedded in an AVI file...

Yes, I had to look up the TV options to mencoder, but that's only because I haven't used a TV card for about 3 years now. You would probably want to fiddle with the options to the TV driver - the equivalent of your v4l2-ctl stuff - but the rest of the long mencoder example you posted was mainly configuring the output of the encoding. Using -oac copy -ovc copy means mencoder will pass the audio and video data through unchanged, without attempting to scale, filter, transcode, compress or do anything else to it.

LWN: Comments on "The Grumpy Editor's video journey, part 1"

$50 will get you a used TiVo on ebay

$50 will get you a used TiVo on ebay

The Grumpy Editor's video journey, part 1

The Grumpy Editor's video journey, part 1

The Grumpy Editor's video journey, part 1

Reasonable defaults

Reasonable defaults

Analog -> IEEE 1394

Another option would be to...

Another option would be to...

Another option would be to...

Another option would be to...

Other external solutions for analogue->digital video

The Grumpy Editor's video journey, part 1

PVR-250

$50 will get you a used TiVo on ebay

v4l2ucp

The Grumpy Editor's video journey, part 1

Analog -> IEEE 1394

$50 will get you a used TiVo on ebay

The Grumpy Editor's video journey, part 1

The Grumpy Editor's video journey, part 1

Reasonable defaults

The Grumpy Editor's video journey, part 1

availability of v4l2-ctl

The Grumpy Editor's video journey, part 1

Other external solutions for analogue->digital video

IEEE 1394 is nice, but...

The Grumpy Editor's video journey, part 1

Analog -> IEEE 1394

The Grumpy Editor's video journey, part 1

The Grumpy Editor's video journey, part 1