Back in April I released a script to create a MPEG video summarising a movie using data from IMDB, you can find the original post in the URL below to learn why I created such a script in the first place.

• IMDB Film Summary as a MPEG2 video

Today I’ve release v2.0 of that script, which is almost a complete re-write mostly thanks to Eric at yPass.net who contributed significantly. Thanks to Eric the script is much improved since version 1.0, here is a run down of what’s new.

v2.0 2009, 19th September

• Merged yet more contributions from Eric, http://www.ypass.net. Thanks Eric!
• Added usage instructions.
• Added categorisation by Certificate.
• Added dynamic computation of video bitrate.
• Added silent audio generation.
• Added a shell script to reprocess an entire film store.
• Re-added MPEG-2 video encoding.
• Improved video encoding speed by removing pre-processing with ‘jpeg2yuv’.
• Fixed spiffy animations when cover art is not available.
• Fixed spiffy animations on platforms that may have incomplete GD.
• Modified filename input so that an input filename is optional rather than mandatory.

v1.2 2009, 17th July.

• Merged extensive contributions from Eric, http://www.ypass.net. Thanks Eric!
• Updated the README to reflect Eric’s changes.
• MPEG-4 video encoding replaced MPEG-2 video encoding.
• Never released to the public.

To download the script and find out how to make full use of it visit the release page below.

• IMDB-to-MPEG

You’ll have seen reference to “spiffy animations” in the change log, take a look at the example video summary clip below to see for yourself.

• About The Usual Suspects (~2Mb)

As it stands the IMDB-to-MPEG script does what I require, so I will maintain it in it’s current form. However, Eric has been working on a new direction by adding support for NetFlix, creating a GUI with php-gtk and some other cool stuff. While Eric has shared the details with me, I simply don’t have the time to add all that good stuff to IMDB-to-MPEG, so if you like the sound of what Eric has been up to hop over to his site to find out more.

• Netflix Has a Developer API

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: 0x13eb
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.

I am about to embark on a mini project at home to archive some old family VHS tapes to DVD. To that end I have been looking for a simple video capture application, so that I can capture to an uncompressed .avi file which I can then edit and convert with avidemux.

wxCam is a webcam application which supports video recording to uncompressed and Xvid avi files. It supports both video4linux 1 and 2 drivers. I have only tested it with my webcam currently, as I have yet to decide what video capture device to get, but it works a treat.

There is a .deb package of wxCam 1.0 which “works for me ™” on Ubuntu 7.10.