[MPlayer-users] Digitizing VHS tapes with mencoder

[Ken Bass]

On Tue, Apr 6, 2010 at 1:51 PM, Josef Wolf <jw at raven.inka.de> wrote:

> On Tue, Apr 06, 2010 at 11:06:16AM -0700, Ken Bass wrote:
> > This was/is a known problem. I was given this link:
> >
> >
> http://lists.mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/mencoder-users/2009-November/010945.html
> >
>
> I fail to understand the post you are referring to. How did you finally
> solve your sync-problems?
>

I guess this isn't the right link (sorry :-( ) . Simply put, what comes out
of your VCR is not digital, and the quality/syncing depends a lot on the
accuracy (cleanness)  of the mag reader head. This indirectly causes a
mencoder  feature/bug that when you end the capture, the indexing of the
frames causes the a/v to be somehow out of sync. Therefore, DON'T end the
mencoder capture before re-indexing what you have captured. Do something
like this:

mencoder -tv "<options>" -o outfn-raw.avi
^Z when you have captured enough
mencoder outfn-raw.avi -forceidx -o outfn-idx.avi

then you can kill the stopped mencoder process.

Yeah, I guess capturing to mjpeg should be fine. Then, I'd need to cut the
> video.
>
>  What format would be best for cutting (with avidemux?)
>

Avidemux understands most formats. You can use it to re-encode the outfn-idx
file to whatever format you need/want - it has a nice gui front end to most
of the mencoder options available. Just remember to add the video filter to
drop damaged frames.

I typically capture via hardware mjpeg (my card does the compression), and
encode via lavc to mpeg4. After re-indexing, I run the video through
mencoder for finer processing, using a two or more pass encoding.

Hope that helps some. Good luck.

ken