Home Brew DVD : Part 1

I am about to undertake a long overdue project my wife has been requesting. Unusually, this is a project I am actually going to enjoy :-) We have a number of videos from family holidays and events that my wife wants converting to DVD.

So I thought I would record progress here in my blog to share my experiences. I am sure there are other blogs, how-to’s and articles covering this topic for Linux users but I want to record my own notes so I can re-create the process in the future. Hopefully someone else will find this useful.

Part 1 : Capture Card

The first job was to get a video capture card that is supported by Linux. I don’t need anything to fancy and after a little research I ordered the Happuage ImpactVCB. So far I can confirm that it “works for me ™” on Ubuntu 7.10.

There are probably better quality capture cards out there, but this was the only one I could easily find in the UK that I knew had a supported chipset. It is purely a video capture device, it has no audio inputs so I will be using my sound card inputs for audio capture.

The ImpactVCB has 4 video inputs, 3x composite and 1x s-video. Having multiple inputs is not a requirement for the job at hand, but I had a play anyway ;-)

The card identifes the inputs as follows.

When I plug a composite video source into ‘television’ or ‘composite1′ I get a picture, I just get a blue on ‘composite3′. Maybe this thread in the ZoneMinder forums is useful?

The BTTV Gallery has the following to say about the ImpactVCB, so it might only support 3 inputs.
Impact VCB  Model.64405 Rev.C1

In any case, it works and I am now off to figure our what capture software I will use.

Posted on April 11, 2008 at 3:21 pm by Martin · Permalink
In: Audio & Video · Tagged with: , , ,

2 Responses

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  1. Written by chrisb
    on July 8, 2008 at 4:18 pm
    Reply · Permalink

    Good luck with this. I will be following your progress, since I think our wives get their project lists from the same place!

  2. Written by Martin
    on July 8, 2008 at 5:58 pm
    Reply · Permalink

    I have actually completed several home brew DVDs now, I just haven’t blogged about it.I created a simple shell script to create my video capture in the end, I’ll add more details tomorrow :-)

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