[MPlayer-users] Digitizing VHS tapes with mencoder

[Josef Wolf]

On Tue, Apr 06, 2010 at 11:06:16AM -0700, Ken Bass wrote:
> I did the same thing as you (except to NTSC), and had a lot of problems with
> the audio keeping in sync with the video. Essentially, the sync kept
> drifting farther apart as I recorded more.
> 
> This was/is a known problem. I was given this link:
> 
> http://lists.mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/mencoder-users/2009-November/010945.html
> 
> which explained these things, and, finally, problem solved. (FWIW: I found
> that just stopping - not killing - the capture process when you have enough,
> then running the re-indexing works just the same as letting the capture
> continue running.

I fail to understand the post you are referring to. How did you finally
solve your sync-problems?

> As for the format to convert to "on-the-fly": that really depends on your
> machine. If you get the problem above, switch to an encoder that needs less
> cpu, then re-encode to your desired format. Note that capturing to raw
> audio/video data will generate too much data for disk i/o too handle, and
> you will get the above error again.

Yeah, I guess capturing to mjpeg should be fine. Then, I'd need to cut the
video.

> Finally, one unspoken (unposted) caveat: due to the nature of the VHS
> playback, you will probably get damaged or corrupted frames that will
> usually show up in a video editor. I use cinelerra, and it would crash, or
> simply not load the video, when it found these. Avidemx has a good (but not
> perfect) filter to get rid of those.

 What format would be best for cutting (with avidemux?)