[Techtalk] VHS to DVD

[Rudy Zijlstra]

On 18-07-12 21:32, Carla Schroder wrote:
> On Wednesday, July 18, 2012 07:44:54 PM David Sumbler wrote:
>>> The Ion gadget outputs raw video, which should be readable by VLC,
>>> OpenShot,  and other Linux video and transcoding software. If you can
>>> find the details of the file formats these devices output then I can
>>> probably be more helpful.>
>>>
>>>
>>> best,
>>> Carla
>> Thanks for your helpful reply.  I think I'm missing something fairly
>> basic, though.
>>
>> When I connect either of the gadgets to the computer, then 'lsusb' shows
>> a line such as:
>> Bus 001 Device 008: ID eb1a:5051 eMPIA Technology, Inc.
>>
>> I have both OpenShot (which I have just downloaded) and VLC, but I can't
>> figure out how to get them to read the stream from the USB port.  As I
>> said, there is probably some basic step I have omitted here!
>>
>> David
> I wonder if the V4L wiki will help:
>
> http://linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/Video_via_USB
>
> So maybe all you need is V4l, though I haven't figured out the magic VLC
> incantation.
>
> This really should be do-able.
>
> Carla
>
you typically record from /dev/video0

Check dmesg to see whether those devices are created when you insert the 
USB connector. The lines will typically also tell you what each device 
is for
Example from ivtv, which handles a HW MPEG encoder:
[   24.954081] Linux video capture interface: v2.00
[   25.672673] ivtv0: Registered device video0 for encoder MPG (4096 kB)
[   25.672738] ivtv0: Registered device video32 for encoder YUV (2048 kB)
[   25.672849] ivtv0: Registered device video24 for encoder PCM (320 kB)

So you would want to record from video0, in order to have nicely 
compressed video. You can specify the compression quality for this card.

as the Ion apparently gives raw video, you would use VLC or another tool 
to record and compress.

the reason that card is in this system, is to rip old PAL recordings to 
digital ;)

Good luck,


Rudy