Kindof a roundabout method, but I have had really great luck capturing from the composite output of the VCR to a dv stream inside a consumer DV camcorder. Then I just use dvgrab to capture the raw DV footage to the PC, then use ffmpeg to convert it to almost any format I could want. I would avoid compressing on the fly if possible, it's not really worth the trouble, better to do it later. DV camcorders are ultra cheap these days. <div>On 3/11/06, Vincent Trouilliez <<a href="mailto:vincent.trouilliez@modulonet.fr">vincent.trouilliez@modulonet.fr </a>> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">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 -- ubuntu-users mailing list <a href="mailto:ubuntu-users@lists.ubuntu.com"> ubuntu-users@lists.ubuntu.com</a> <a href="https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-users">https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-users</a> </blockquote></div> -- Jonathan S. Romero