I volunteered to digitize a set of old VHS tapes for ADF. I’d say “recently” but it took much more effort than I expected. Resources I thought I had access to disappeared, and hardware failures and quirks were the order of the day.
In the end I wound up using a DVC-100 I picked up at a garage sale along with mencoder. To save people time in the future, here’s what I had to do to make it work under Ubuntu 12.04.
First off, it turned out I needed to set up a loopback device in a ~/.asoundrc to get good audio capture while doing this.
The loopback device looks like this — this can be placed in your .asoundrc as the whole contents of the file:
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Then I had to work out an mencoder commandline. This is what I found to work; some of the encoder parameters can be changed of course, particularly the bitrate. I was surprised that the input audio rate had to be dictated to mencoder — I would have expected autodetection.
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This can be previewed by using mplayer in lieu of mencoder and removing all of the output aspects.
In the long run I used ffmpeg to trim things down using the -t option after previewing the clips. I did find that using -ss to trim off the front was a problem; apparently dvdauthor expects that the video stream appears first. I was unable to come up with a solution for this, and in the end I re-recorded the one clip where trimmingat the start was required.
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I hope this helps someone else, since it was quite a bit of digging on my part, and that after the failure of several other options to do it on a shoestring.