[MPlayer-users] Digitizing VHS tapes with mencoder

[Josef Wolf]

On Tue, Apr 06, 2010 at 06:49:14PM -0700, Ken Bass wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 6, 2010 at 1:51 PM, Josef Wolf <jw at raven.inka.de> wrote:
> 
> > 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.

Ah, now I see what you are suggesting. But I still fail to see why this is
needed. What difference does it make whether the first mecoder is stopped
or killed?

> > 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 don't seem to find such a filter in mencoder...

> 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.

I tried this command for encoding:

 mencoder -aspect 4:3 infile.avi -vf yadif=0,harddup -mc 0 -noskip -ovc x264
  -x264encopts me=umh:partitions=all:trellis=2:crf=22:threads=4 -oac mp3lame
  -lameopts preset=standard:mode=2 -srate 44100 -o outfile.avi

This seems to give quite good results, but the files are about 1GB per hour.
Guess I could reduce quality a bit...

Will I be able to create DVDs from x264 without re-encoding?