[TriLUG] VHS to digital video

[Andrew Perrin]

Thanks to all who replied to this query.  I ended up buying two Pinnacle
PCTV Rave cards (one for home, one for office). These cost roughly $50 a
piece and work nearly seamlessly under my debian installations (both
kernel 2.4.24).

I compiled video4linux and the bttv driver into the kernels, plugged the
TV cards in, and ran. The xawtv application took a little setting up (I
had to add:

[global]
freqtab = us-cable-hrc

to /etc/X11/xawtvrc to get it to work, but once it worked it's great. A
little strange to see TV in a box on the desktop though!

To record, I now use:

streamer -t 0:15 -o cnn.avi -f mjpeg -F stereo


to record 15 seconds of whatever channel is currently tuned in.

Thanks again-
ap

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Andrew J Perrin - http://www.unc.edu/~aperrin
Assistant Professor of Sociology, U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
clists at perrin.socsci.unc.edu * andrew_perrin (at) unc.edu