Pretty much since I saw Buck Rogers on TV in the 80's, I've been obsessed with archival. I think it was because they made a point of having that section in each show where Buck explained the crazy 20th century things he was into. Wilma, Dr. Theopolis, and Dr. Huer always were incredulous at the things he ate, drank, and listened to.
I used to wake up in cold sweats at the idea that someday, I might not be able to play Adventure on the Atari 2600. Since then, I've worked on keeping archives of as much stuff as I can. My place is a testament to this, with thousands of CDs, DVDs, video game systems, vinyl records, cassettes, books, etc. I've even got directories scattered on every system I have with emulators of old systems in case I have the desire to play Caverns of Mars, Temple of Apshai, or even Cheyenne.
Anyway, lately I've been worried about the stack of boxes of VHS tapes in my work room. It's huge, and until I digitize a bunch of that stuff, it's all slowly going bad. My tapes of The Idiot Box aren't doing so well, and I'm afraid I'm going to lose more.
I'm working on building my own PVR so that I can record and store more stuff, but for now, I just picked up a Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-150. It's not great, but it should do for my purposes. I waded through the IVTV stuff to get the card recognized, but the harder part is finding a freaking app that will VIEW the capture stream. So far all of the TV apps I have don't let me see much, and if they do, they won't record while viewing the stream.
After much searching, I found a decent solution. First, recording is WAY easy, as you just cat the device (which is usually /dev/video) to a file. Bang, it's recording. Very easy. The only issue is that it's hard to watch the video while you're recording (or to test it when you're not). I found a few options. Both xine and mplayer take /dev/video as an argument from the command line. Xv seemed to be the best output option for keeping up with the video, but it still chugged occasionally on my machine.
The easiest solution is to record the video and then have your favorite video player play the recorded file back as its recording. This worked well for me. There is a delay, so you won't be able to neatly start & stop the file, but if you can edit the file with something like avidemux, you should be ok.
The second solution -- and the one I went with -- was to go get a cheap TV to use as a monitor. I got a small 11" from Best Buy for about $61, and not only is it great for this, but I can use it to hook old computers into (my Atari 800 has been itching to be hooked up).
One last aspect I got together was to use flowplayer to play flash videos from my site. Then, I use the all-powerful ffmpeg to convert the mpeg to flv, and I can play the videos from my server without having to upload them to YouTube. There are some I'd like to share, but there are others I'd like to control. Overall, I'd like more of a GUI solution, but maybe I'll have to write an app that mixes a few things together myself.
Another one for the list. Sigh.
Posted by flynn at April 21, 2007 11:10 PM