Capture VHS to mpeg2 on BeOS 5?

Hi,

How do I capture VHS video to mpeg2 on BeOS 5?

I know that I need a video capture card, but which programs should I use?

PersonalStudio
Capture
TV Recorder

Your best bet hardware wise is one of the Brooktree (Bt484 IIRC) chipset cards. I used to have a TV one and you could capture any analogue TV signal under BeOS using any of the apps mentioned, or Cody Cam also worked.

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BT848 and 878, 878 was higher quality. These are now very old.

There were also drivers for a few early ATI All-In-Wonder cards.

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I’m still hoping to revive my good old Canopus ACEDvio card to capture some old but personally precious material.
This Canopus card was special because it had an excellent A/D chipset developed inhouse, and also a native port of the codec for BeOS, but you didn’t need a driver for the card itself, since it also supported IEEE 1394/firewire and transparently integrated over that.

Sadly I couldn’t get Haiku (32bit in that case) or BeOS/Zeta to run on my old machine yet, but once I get it running again I can report.
Managed to capture some video (but no audio yet) with Linux some years ago, but want to do it in Haiku now.
I guess the old Canopus codec should work in the nearly-binary-compatible Haiku x32 version, right?

Once I have captured the material, I’ll give Medo a good try:)

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Honestly, there are companies that do this for a very reasonable fee. I tried a long time ago with working equipment and the result wasn’t worth the effort vrsus cost of paying someone to do it.

I understand that, but it really wouldn’t be much of a hassle, if I had done it 10 years ago;=)
Now my old self-built PC which hosts the card is nearing end-of-life, and I couldn’t get any OS to boot anymore;)
And then again, I’m a developer, tinkerer, so I love that stuff for the heck of it, also that card was not cheap (200 EUR), and hasn’t given me any ROI yet;)
I remember testing it out back in the day, and got great looking digital footage from my Sony Hi8 cam then.
Also, given the amount of content, it would be quite expensive to outsource it.

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Yeah, the problem is getting a good quality capture. I used adobe premiere on Windows xp, both are kinda freeware if you grab old versions

I have a few VHS videos to digitize as well. I have a very old machine with an ATI All-In-Wonder with coax input. I think this might be my BeOS machine but I haven’t booted it in ages. It would be neat if I ended up using BeOS to save my videos. Though worse case I can use Windows XP. I also want to salvage whatever files I have on my BFS drive if it still works…maybe there are some long lost file from BeBits or similar.

Then probably it is time for this machine to be disposed of…I only have so much desk space and about twice as many computers as I could possibly need. Though I suspect to get a massive feeling of nostalgia if I can boot this machine again. Maybe I can find time this weekend…

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It’s ok to move on, we all become different people over time.

Is there no docking station / Adapter for your old hdd of the old computer to take a look from haiku to the data?

The code could work, but the firewire port for Haiku was dropped some months ago! So, no way for Haiku to grab your videos!

As far as I remember BeOs was able to capture Video from some Video cards!
I had a BT-Brooktree S-VHS card and this was working with BeOs that time…

Best advice is given by SCollins! Give your VHS tapes to a companies for that work!

Curious why firewire was dropped.

It was massively incomplete; and no new Firewire products have been manufactured for years

Avoiding computer hardware entirely, I use a combined JVC VHS and DVD recorder deck to capture in VHS tapes to DVD-RAM, which nearly all PC DVD drives can read. Decks were basically free a few years ago but are creeping up in value, $200 seems common - but if you have no working capture kit you’ll be paying out anyway.

Worse than that, it was crashing the media server and/or leaking memory. And no one offered to fix these problems. If someone submit patches to fix it, we’re happy to reinclude it, but none of us still has firewire hardware to even test it on. So we focus our efforts on other things for now.

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I have a firewire card

I recently got an elgato video capture card from a colleague who used it to capture his videos. Curious what chipset it uses, couldn’t find out yet, and Haiku doesn’t seem to detect it (not showing up as capture card and no device info).

I’ll use it in Windows and then maybe give Medo a closer look😌
Btw would kdenlive also work or does it use media APIs outside of Qt, and libs other than ffmpeg and friends?