[Techtalk] VHS to DVD

[David Sumbler]

On Mon, 2012-07-23 at 16:28 -0400, Anthony de Boer wrote:
> David Sumbler wrote:
> > If I enter 'cat /dev/video0' I get a continuous stream of gibberish,
> > which is what I would expect.  But I can't get VLC to display anything
> > at all.
> 
> That continuous stream might be one of encoded video, if it's anything
> like the capture card I used.
> 
> Type 'cat /dev/video0 > mycapture.mpg', feed some video into the card,
> and then ^C it.  At this point running something like mplayer on the
> file should show you video.
> 
> Usually next I'd run avidemux to chop the static off the front and back
> of the recording and dub into the codec of choice for storage and later
> playback.



Further to my previous reply, after looking at the mplayer man page I
tried 'mplayer mycapture.mpg -demuxer rawvideo'.  This was no better
than my previous attempt, so then I did 'mplayer mycapture.mpg -demuxer
rawvideo -rawvideo w=733:h=625'.

This produces a window with flashing green patterns on it, and gives the
following output in the terminal:

MPlayer SVN-r33713-4.6.1 (C) 2000-2011 MPlayer Team
mplayer: could not connect to socket
mplayer: No such file or directory
Failed to open LIRC support. You will not be able to use your remote
control.

Playing mycapture.mpg.
rawvideo file format detected.
Load subtitles in ./
open: No such file or directory
[MGA] Couldn't open: /dev/mga_vid
open: No such file or directory
[MGA] Couldn't open: /dev/mga_vid
[VO_TDFXFB] Can't open /dev/fb0: Permission denied.
[VO_3DFX] Unable to open /dev/3dfx.
==========================================================================
Opening video decoder: [raw] RAW Uncompressed Video
Movie-Aspect is undefined - no prescaling applied.
VO: [vdpau] 733x625 => 733x625 Planar I420 
Selected video codec: [rawi420] vfm: raw (RAW I420)
==========================================================================
Audio: no sound
Starting playback...
V:  19.7 494/494  0%  2%  0.0% 0 0 
Frame too small! (78890<686509) Wrong format?
V:  19.8 495/495  0%  2%  0.0% 0 0 


Exiting... (End of file)


I also tried other values for w and h, but I can't relate the values
output in the line starting "Frame too small!" with the input values.  I
thought that if I could get these values correct I might be in with a
chance of seeing something useful, but I have no idea what they should
be.

Any suggestions, anyone?

David