[ale] svideo recorder to hard disk

[Derek Atkins]

Jeff Hubbs <jhubbslist at att.net> writes:

> I have some model of Hauppage card in my file server (lspcis as "Multimedia
> video controller: Internext Compression Inc iTVC16 (CX23416) MPEG-2 Encoder")
> that encodes composite or S-video to MPEG-2 in hardware; you can cat the
> device's stream to a file.  I finally worked out which utility to use and the
> invocation thereof (handbrake) to get an mp4 file I can import into iMovie on
> OS X.

This would be a PVR-250 card.  They are quite nice, and supported by the
Linux ivtv driver (which has been integrated into the kernel for many
years now).  You can get them relatively inexpensively.  They will
record composite or svideo NTSC and encode (in hardware) to MPEG2.  If
you want to record HD or component video you'll need something else.

By encoding in hardware you can get a decent size bitstream with very
little CPU usage.  I tend to record mine at fairly high quality
encoding, around 1GB/hr.

-derek
-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available