This works on my FC15 system with the VHS player plugged into a Pinnacle Dazzle DVC 100 USB capture device to copy VHS tapes to AVI files with syncronised video and sound; uses under 15% cpu on a dual core with 3Gb memory. A few ‘spikes’ in the sound cause a buzz, and there are a few flickers in the video, but it works.
mencoder tv:// -tv fps=25:buffersize=64:driver=v4l2:norm=PAL:audiorate=44100:immediatemode=0:device=/dev/video0:alsa:forceaudio:immediatemode=0:forcechan=2:adevice=hw.1,0 -ovc lavc -oac copy -o video.avi
Of course you have to keep an eye on the VHS player to see when it stops and ctrl-C out of the capture, or you get an awfull lot of black soundless, but perfectly valid, movie at the end of the AVI file.
I have tried various options to try to improve the quality of sound and video, but any attempt to play with other settings results in the audio getting out of sync again. Ignore the duplicate frame errors that occur from the above command, using -noskip and -noslices just guarantees sound will be out of sync, so don’t use those.
Obviously the hw address used for audio will differ from system to system (and may even change if you plug the DVC 100 into a different USB hub port). The easiest way to determine the device hw address is to simply use mplayer with similar options; for example the command below will play the VHS tape with sound with no problems on my machine and the same device and adevice should be used in the mencoder command above.
mplayer -ao pulse tv:// -tv fps=25:buffersize=64:driver=v4l2:norm=PAL:audiorate=44100:immediatemode=0:device=/dev/video0:alsa:forceaudio:adevice=hw.1,0
Posted here; as I keep losing track of where I put my scripts, so this will be my reference :-).
The mencoder command has sucessfully processed two Kate Bush music VHS tapes into AVI files usable by VLC; and yes it is stuff like this (VHS tapes I have that are not available on DVD and probably never will be) that I need to backup before my last VHS player dies.
