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.

• S-Video Input : svideo
• Composite closest to S-video : composite1
• Middle Composite input : television
• Composite farthest from S-Video : composite3

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?

• happuage 4 input card

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

chips: Fusion 878A 25878-13, 24lc02, xtal28
connectors: Cvid, Cvid, Cvid, Svid (7pol)
pcb: 640000-03 (c) 2000

bttv0: Bt878 (rev 17) at 00:11.0, irq: 9, latency: 32, mmio: 0xe4101000
bttv0: detected: Hauppauge WinTV [card=10], PCI subsystem ID is 0070:13eb
bttv0: gpio: en=00000000, out=00000000 in=00ffffff [init #1]
bttv0: Hauppauge eeprom: model=64405, tuner=Unspecified (4), radio=no

detect
0xa0: eeprom
0xa2: ???
0xa4: ???
0xa6: ???
0xa8: ???
0xaa: ???
0xac: ???
0xae: ???

eeprom -x
0000   84 12 00 00  05 50 0e 7f  01 02 23 95  fb 00 10 8d   …..P……….
0010   00 00 00 00  00 84 0a 00  01 01 20 77  00 40 aa bb   ………..w….
0020   40 00 74 02  01 00 00 79  39 00 00 00  00 00 00 00   ..t….y9…….
0030   00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00   …………….
0040   00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00   …………….
0050   00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00   …………….
0060   00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00   …………….
0070   00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00  13 eb 00 70   ……………p
wdh.

PCI Vendor ID: 0×0070, Subsystem ID: 0×13eb
Decoding Hauppauge EEPROM:
Model        : 64405
Revision     : C1 
Serial       : 4242346
Tuner        : Unspecified
Tuner Formats: unknown1
Ext. Inputs  : 3
Svideo       : yes
Audio        : None
Audio Outputs: None
Decoder      : BT878
Video Formats: NTSC(M) PAL(BGHIDK) SECAM(L/L´) PAL(M) PAL(N) NTSC(443) PAL(NCOMBO)
Videotext    : Yes (Software)
Radio        : no
Infrared     : no
Checksum     : 39 [OK]
EEPROM:
84 12 00 00 05 50 0e 7f 01 02 23 95 fb 00 10 8d 00 00 00 00 00
84 0a 00 01 01 20 77 00 40 aa bb 40 00
74 02 01 00 00
79 39

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