Hi everyone,

My goal is to be able to plug a VCR into my video capture card and record the contents of VHS tapes and then create DVDs from the result.

I have a WinFast TV2000 capture card, which has the Conexant chipset. It appears to be supported by my kernel because all the v4l modules auto-load at startup, including the right driver for the chipset.

My question is: What software is recommended for such a simple task? I downloaded MythTV, but that needs a MySQL server running. Surely I don't need to be running a DB server to do this? I'm not interested in watching TV or listening to the radio. All I want to do is record from the VCR to the computer so that I can make DVDs from my old VHS tapes.

Is there any software which will output the result to DVD standard MPEG2?? I've tried some Windows software, but it always outputs the results to avi or adds some proprietary crap to its output, so I have to run it thru Avidemux2 before I can create DVDs.

Also, are there any UP TO DATE HOWTOs on V4L? Everything that comes up in Google is at least 3 years old and applicable to Linux 2.2 or 2.4.

Any input will be greatly appreciated.

Rob.

I've done this in the past, but don't remember exactly how. I would think you could do it in one step with mencoder, as in:

http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en...ml#tv-examples

You shouldn't need to know much about v4l if it is installed correctly. I do remember that with input from a standard VHS/PAL tape the quality was pretty crap