[Cin] offtopic: Digitize and record Video with A/D USB adapters

[Terje J. Hanssen]

Mat and all

I take a follow-up included below:

Den 25.09.2021 20:47, skrev mnieuw--- via Cin:
> Hi Terje,
> I have used a cheap chinese USB video grabber to digitise VHS. But I
> cannot remember the type.
> I used VLC, which worked fine, but OBS should also work. I had loaned
> the grabber, and have not tested if Cinelerra-GG could use it directly.
> I cannot remember if video and audio showed up as two different devices
> or not. If the audio is not a separate device, then I doubt
> Audacity can record with it.
>
> The quality of VHS is not that great, well below SD, I did not use a
> lossless format. There are several, Andrea listed some he used. But all
> those use very big files.

If available, it could be of interest to get mediainfo output for the 
format you grabbed?
I would be surprised if the Chroma subsampling was better than 4:2:0 
(like PAL DV, about 29 Mb/s)

The lossless format mentioned, were they grabbed with another capture 
device?

I myself did some ProRes 422 HQ (SD) recorded at 80 Mb/s overall bitrate.


> I don't know about the audio quality, it is likely more than good
> enough for VHS. But my guess is that a motherboard's A/D is better.


Den 26.09.2021 09:05, skrev mat via Cin:
> Terje,
>
> I found out which USB grabber I was using. It was the Basetech EasyCap
> BT116; the same device might well have been sold under a different
> name. On Windows, VLC gave a lot of errors, but OBS handled it fine. It
> only handled standard SD format, not HD, so output is alwasy 4:3 .
>
> But for me using Linux Mint, it worked with VLC, but not Cinelerra.

It seems that Basetech EasyCap BT116 was not on the LinuxTVWiki list (2016)
https://linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/Easycap


Den 28.09.2021 12:47, skrev mnieuw--- via Cin:
> Hi Terje,
>
> - I would avoid plug-in cards, you are completely dependent on the
>    manufacturer's support for Linux drivers. On the other hand, USB
>    grabbers usually follow standard USB audio/video rules, and almost
>    always work.
> - You want grabbing in uncompressed 4:2:2 format (4:4:4 does not make
>    much sense for PAL), the datastream is no problem for even USB2 .
> - CinGG did not work with my then Easycap grabber, because it could not
>    switch it to PAL, and the default after plugging it in was NTSC.
>    However, this was a bug in CinGG, VLC worked fine with the same
>    device. I did some work on it but never finished it, lack of time.
>
> MatN


I've also got confirmed from AVerMedia that their CU511B USB3 (full HD) 
box mentioned just has been EOLed. Their only current solution with 
Linux driver (for Ubuntu) seems to be  CL311M2 (full HD), which again is 
a PCIe grabber card.

Terje J. H


https://www.avermedia.com/professional/download/cl311_m2#ans_part