I want to migrate my VHS collection to DVD5. I have a Hauppauge PVR 350 card in my SuSE PC. I can capture video through a regular cat-command (cat /dev/video0 > /mnt/hdb1/TV/recordings/tmp.mpg). But the file is app. 5 times too large. How can I shrink it 5 times in order to be able to fit 8 hours of VHS-video onto a 4.37 GB DVD5 without too much loss of video- and audio-quality? I want to be able to play the video-files (mpeg, avi, divx, xvid... which ever format offers the best quality at a 5:1 compression ratio) both on Linux and Windows.

Hi,

you are dumping the raw video stream.
Give mplayer/mencoder a try. With mencoder you can capture the video-stream and convert it to mpeg2/4/divx etc. in one step. You can also control the quality of the sound.
To demux the stream I use avidemux. Multiplex the sound and video I use mplex from the mjpegtools and prepare the dvd-filestructure with dvdwizard/dvdauthor.

HTH

karpi is incorrect that Hauppauge PVR-350 outputs raw video stream. It only outputs MPEG-1 or MPEG-2. MPlayer mencoder will just lag behind or drop several frames because it have to decode the MPEG-1/MPEG-2 stream to encode it to another stream.

I did the following a few times using Hauppauge PVR-250 to make a DVD compatible disc with out any problems.
1) ivtvctl -c bitrate=8000000,bitrate_peak=9600000,stream_type=14,audio=0xc9
2) cat /dev/video0 > input.mpg
3) replex -i PS -v 0xe0 -a 0xc0 -k -t DVD -o output.mpg input.mpg
4) dvdauthor -o finaldvd output.mpg
5) dvdauthor -o finaldvd -T

You can try to adjust the bitrate and bitrate_peak until the quality just barely gets bad. Not all DVD players may not be able to play it back. I suggest using either DVD+RW or DVD-RW for testing with the bitrate and bitrate_peak.

A DVD-5 can only handle up to 2 hours (120 minutes), but it varies depending on the material and bit rates. Have you looked into dual layer DVD drives because it (DVD-9) can store up to 4 hours (240 minutes).