[mythtv-users] good hardware for transferring videos from vhs and dvd players

David Brodbeck gull at gull.us
Mon Jan 11 02:19:11 UTC 2010


Mike Andrews wrote:
> dear folks,
>
> i'm interested in mythtv for transferring my vhs and dvd collection to
> the computer. do folks have a particular set of hardware cards or O/S
> to recommend for this?
>   
I've used an AVC-2410 MPEG capture card to do this with VHS tapes.  
(It's basically a clone of the PVR-150.)  I think these cards have been 
discontinued, though, so I'm not sure how helpful that will be.

Note that if these are commercial videotapes they will probably be 
Macrovision protected, and this will cause flickering, flashing, and 
blackouts in the recording.  I actually had problems with it just 
*watching* tapes on my video projector due to this form of copy 
protection.  There are devices that will stabilize the video but I'm not 
going to say anything more about that here because of list rules about 
discussing copy protection.

Note that Myth itself is probably not the best way to capture video from 
tape; you'll have to mess with the scheduler to fool it into recording 
the whole tape without interruption.  It's best to do the actual capture 
with something else.  In the case of an MPEG card this can be as simple 
as "cat /dev/video0 >video.mpg".



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