4 ms·

I've written my own software to automate this with a high end VHS player, but the captures still occur in real-time. This sounds very interesting - what VHS pl

I've written my own software to automate this with a high end VHS player, but the captures still occur in real-time. This sounds very interesting - what VHS player are you using, and what is your workflow? If you don't have a writeup somewhere, would you consider publishing one? I think many people would find it useful and interesting.

azinman2 6y ago
Panasonic AG-5710. It has an RS232 port meant to be driven by a hardware controller for professional video editing. I managed to acquire the manual for it, which documented the protocol it speaks -- something that would never happen today, sadly. I wrote a driver in Python for it that I'll probably open source at some point. From there I wrote a Mac app to drive the VCR, preview the output (useful for inspecting unlabeled tapes before capture), perform the capture, detect end-of-material to then stop playback & eject the tape, and fully automate the post-processing. It's been several months in the making with tweaking here and there. Next up is automating the generation of a webpage with the library, and maybe even generate the emails I send out (although not sure if I can interface easily with Dropbox to get the public link that I send). I originally went down the Linux/Windows route with different capture hardware, but both proved to be horrible development experiences with unstable drivers that would crash my system, have audio stop working, or some other kind of misc problem. It's too bad because I have a much fancier video card in my linux box than my 2012 MBP possesses for hardware-accelerated encoding. That said, doing the extra trimming/splitting operations in QuickTime Player has been quite easy in a way that I don't think Linux/Windows would have matched as well, so I'm happy with my solution. I probably will do a write-up at some point (and would love to open source it), but I might have to clear this with my employer first.
- forgingahead 6y ago
  Thanks for the info! Yes, a writeup, and open-sourcing the Python driver you wrote would be excellent. We've got tons of tapes still unconverted, and as another commenter mentioned, it's better to do it sooner than later. On an MBP 2012 as well, and also have a powerful Linux desktop for ML work, so definitely sympathise with the divide in hardware. Interesting that you're using Quicktime - is ffmpeg not suitable because you need a GUI for the trimming/splitting?
  - azinman2 6y ago
    I use ffmpeg to do some automatic trimming and to force encode the video as top-field encoded. My capture hardware lies and says it’s deinterlaced, when the video is not. I’ve tried deinterlacing with it but found best compromise quality / effort / speed wise using Apple’s Compressor and it’s deinterlacing algorithm. I don’t know why I’m unable to override the capture in AVFoundation; maybe someone smarter than me can tell me how to do this (I suspect it’s not possible). I use QuickTime to go through the material and do the splits / manual trimming. This happens often as one tape was used for multiple events and sometimes TV content as well.

azinman2 6y ago

Panasonic AG-5710. It has an RS232 port meant to be driven by a hardware controller for professional video editing. I managed to acquire the manual for it, which documented the protocol it speaks -- something that would never happen today, sadly. I wrote a driver in Python for it that I'll probably open source at some point. From there I wrote a Mac app to drive the VCR, preview the output (useful for inspecting unlabeled tapes before capture), perform the capture, detect end-of-material to then stop playback & eject the tape, and fully automate the post-processing. It's been several months in the making with tweaking here and there. Next up is automating the generation of a webpage with the library, and maybe even generate the emails I send out (although not sure if I can interface easily with Dropbox to get the public link that I send). I originally went down the Linux/Windows route with different capture hardware, but both proved to be horrible development experiences with unstable drivers that would crash my system, have audio stop working, or some other kind of misc problem. It's too bad because I have a much fancier video card in my linux box than my 2012 MBP possesses for hardware-accelerated encoding. That said, doing the extra trimming/splitting operations in QuickTime Player has been quite easy in a way that I don't think Linux/Windows would have matched as well, so I'm happy with my solution. I probably will do a write-up at some point (and would love to open source it), but I might have to clear this with my employer first.

forgingahead 6y ago
Thanks for the info! Yes, a writeup, and open-sourcing the Python driver you wrote would be excellent. We've got tons of tapes still unconverted, and as another commenter mentioned, it's better to do it sooner than later. On an MBP 2012 as well, and also have a powerful Linux desktop for ML work, so definitely sympathise with the divide in hardware. Interesting that you're using Quicktime - is ffmpeg not suitable because you need a GUI for the trimming/splitting?
- azinman2 6y ago
  I use ffmpeg to do some automatic trimming and to force encode the video as top-field encoded. My capture hardware lies and says it’s deinterlaced, when the video is not. I’ve tried deinterlacing with it but found best compromise quality / effort / speed wise using Apple’s Compressor and it’s deinterlacing algorithm. I don’t know why I’m unable to override the capture in AVFoundation; maybe someone smarter than me can tell me how to do this (I suspect it’s not possible). I use QuickTime to go through the material and do the splits / manual trimming. This happens often as one tape was used for multiple events and sometimes TV content as well.