Best (Fedora) way to capture/archive videos for LATER editing?

[Marko Vojinovic]

On Thu, 7 Nov 2013 14:22:58 +0100
"M. Fioretti" <mfioretti at nexaima.net> wrote:

> What Fedora-compatible video capture hardware should I buy to hook VHS
> players, Firewire camcorders... to my computer?

For VHS, you want to get a TV card. Lookup "video4linux" documentation
(usually called v4l) to find out what chipsets are supported by the
Linux kernel --- before you buy the hardware. Also, in case of TV cards,
hardware quality is usually proportional to its price.

Another thing that I can recommend is to ask someone else to do it for
you --- there are professional/commercial mini-studios that can convert
your VHS to some digital format (usually to DVD), for a small price.
Typically they own the hardware do it with better quality than you could
do it yourself.

As for firewire, AFAIK this already comes in a digital format. This
means that the capture software and hardware do not need to do
analog-to-digital conversion, the data already comes in digital. In
addition to the recording/capture software, you just need a camcorder
to playback the tape through the firewire, and you need to have a
firewire port in your computer. If you don't have one, any firewire PCI
card will do the job.

Depending on your camcorder, the firewire data may come in the raw,
uncompressed DV format. You want to have *a* *lot* of hard disk space
for that. I vaguely remember needing tens of GB per hour of
tape. After you have the file on your hard drive, you can transcode it
to some format of reasonable size, and play around with various
compression levels, quality settings, etc.

> what tools do you recommend (command-line stuff is OK) for grabbing
> the video from that hardware, transcoding and saving to disk only
> specified parts automatically (meaning connect the VHS player, then
> tell Fedora "save by yourself only the first 5:30 minutes, then from
> minute 40:20 to 43:10, of the incoming video")

I know that mplayer/mencoder can do this, if you are not afraid of
reading the mammoth man page and finding the relevant command-line
options. :-) However, my usual recommendation is --- grab the whole
tape to a file first, and then cut out unneeded pieces from the digital
version. You'll have far greater control of the positions of the cuts
than you would have if you would capture time-based pieces. That
way you'll also avoid potential A/V sync issues, etc...

HTH, :-)
Marko