Just earlier than Christmas, I made a decision it was time for my children to see considered one of my favourite motion pictures: The Muppet Christmas Carol. I grabbed the tape (sure, tape) off the shelf and put it within the VCR (sure, VCR) and… nothing occurred. Oh no!
I’ve a dozen or so motion pictures on VHS that we nonetheless watch. To be trustworthy, I am not that involved in regards to the industrial motion pictures; these are straightforward sufficient to interchange. But what about our house motion pictures? My highschool cross nation crew movies and my spouse’s marching band movies, amongst others—you will not discover these on Netflix anytime quickly. So I made a decision it was time to get severe about one thing I might been which means to do for a very long time: Digitize my VHS tapes.
In this text, I am going to describe how I arrange my Fedora desktop to transform my VHS tapes into 1s and 0s. Previously, Don Watkins described a different setup for VHS conversion.
Step 1
The very first thing I wanted was a video seize card. Years in the past, I had one which I had used for a MythTV setup. I knew the producer was well-supported in Linux, so I simply wanted to discover a mannequin that had RCA enter. I purchased a used Hauppauge WinTV PVR-150 and put in it in an accessible PCI slot.
The kernel acknowledged the seize card. So far, so good.
Step 2
I opened VLC and tried to view the enter. No luck. After nosing round in dmesg output, I found that I did not have the firmware for that card (v4l-cx2341x-enc, particularly). Fortunately, Fedora’s ivtv-firmware bundle has the information I wanted. After a dnf set up ivtv-firmware and a reboot, I used to be off to the races.
Or not. VLC nonetheless wasn’t displaying me something, however I may watch the video enter from mplayer. More particularly, I may watch static. But, it was progress.
Step three
The final step was to inform the cardboard which enter I wished it to make use of. I put in the v4l-utils bundle, and after some trial and error discovered that v4l2-ctl -i 2 set it to make use of the RCA enter (as a substitute of coax or S-video).
With that accomplished, mplayer /dev/video0 gave me the output from my VCR. Now to reserve it to a file. mplayer -cache 8192 /dev/video0 -dumpstream -dumpfile my_video.mp4 was the command I wanted. The -cache 8192 helped suppress some occasional error messages about my laptop being too gradual (it isn’t, I promise).
That’s a wrap!
That’s all it took; a couple of steps and I used to be changing my VHS tapes to digital information. The solely draw back is that mplayer cannot inform when the tape has reached the top, so it requires some cautious babysitting to cease the seize. Once the information are accomplished, I take advantage of Kdenlive to snip off the additional firstly and finish.
Now you possibly can digitize your personal tapes earlier than VCRs fully vanish from the face of the earth. Have solutions for the right way to enhance this workflow? Let us know within the feedback beneath.
