Digitizing VHS Tapes?

[Vincent Trouilliez]

On Sat, 2006-03-11 at 11:53 -0800, CJ Kelley wrote:
>         Second off, you should be able to plug ur vhs player into your
>         tv card (if its an internal card) and just play the video and
>         record the video via tv card software to the hard drive.

I did try that last night, using XawTV (since I have a BT chip based
card like the OP has), but although I could record just fine, I had
problems of A/V sync. About +0.90sec when recording TV at full/native
res (SECAM) with 24 FPS and 44.1KHz 8 bit mono audio.
My CPU was fully loaded, 100%, so I guess it's not fast and/or powerful
enough. It's a 1.45GHz AMD CPU (Athlon XP 1700+).
So I guess I would need a faster CPU if I wanted to record properly, or
a TV card with hardware encoder that can compress the video stream in
MPEG on the fly.
Or maybe my CPU is fast enough, but the software encoder in XawTv is not
efficient, and another would do better... no idea... hardly an
expert ! :-/
But I sure would love to have a robust and reliable way to encode VHS
tapes too, as I do have one or two that I need to digitize (to keep them
on my hard drive though, not to transfer to DVD discs).

--
Vince