Hello everybody.

I just bought a Hauppauge Win PVR 350 TV card for my Ubuntu box.

I think it's set up nicely, because I can see and record analog TV streams with MythTV.

The other main thing I'd like to do with that cart is capturing all my old VHS tapes on hard disk, using the S-VIDEO (or composite) input of the card.

Can anybody give me some advice? I don't know how and if I can configure MythTV to do this.

Actually, I don't care much using another app to do the thing, even if command line. What I just need is getting my VHs tapes on hard disk with the highest quality. Then I think I can learn to use Cinelerra or Avidemux or some other editing application to do the editing job at a later time.

Thank you very much in advance.

Whew! Cinerella is... rough to say the least. I'd probably recommend something more like Kino maybe. Anyway... My experience with my PVR-500 is that I have a video device (/dev/video0 and /dev/video1) that directly correspond to my input(s). When I feed something into, for example, my F-Connector (the "Cable TV" plug) I can do the following:
cat /dev/video0 > myvideo.mpg

I use CTRL+C to stop it when I'm done.

And then use mplayer to play it back:
mplayer myvideo.mpg

Alternatively I suppose you may be able to use mencoder directly, but I would have to look that up to give you a decent idea of commands to use. If the 'cat' doesn't work, I'll look up mencoder options.

-Chad

Thank you for answering.

Which format does cat save to? I know the PVR 500 has an onboard MPEG encoder chip.

Can I choose whether to save in MPEG or uncompressed video?

Another question: one of the main editing works I'd like to do after I capture all my tapes is make a "definitive" video of various music concerts me and my friends have filmed from various angles.

Audio syncing questions aside, I think with Cinelerra I can open all my "video tracks" at once, then just mark a segment of, say, track 1 to be rendered on the output video, then a segment of track 2, then again track 1 and so on.

This would be much simpler than cutting and pasting pieces of video together, like I've done for other projects with Avidemux.

Is it possible with Kino, too?

Sorry for the late reply.

It saves it to mpeg2 format, yes because the onboard encoder encodes the video

No, there is no choice either way, the video must run through the onboard encoder before it gets to any of the outputs for the 350 to be able to play it back (I guess I should say without any hardware modifications).

If you are comfortable with using something as involved as Cinerella, go for it. Kino does have somewhat of a storyboard format, but I think it's somewhat limited compared to Cinerella and it sounds like that is what you are describing. There are other tools as well, but each have their own caveats while Cinerella's just seems to be a steep learning curve.

Good luck!

-Chad