8-millimeter video tapes seem to be slowly fading into oblivion. In order to save old family videos recorded in this format, I’ve decided to digitize them.
After a quick try with vlc, I understood that it wasn’t the right tool for the task. It crashed with a cryptic error message every time I tried to encode H.264 video, and it seemed that it was best suited for real-time encoding. Doing real-time encoding is sub-optimal, as I can’t achieve high-quality encoding at a reasonable bit rate.
So I looked for another tool and recalled ffmpeg. While ffmpeg provided everything I was looking for – high-quality video encoding using H.264 and stability – it wasn’t an easy start. ffmpeg’s defaults are notoriously ill-chosen. After hours of going through man pages, I’ve managed to capture and convert video tapes into high-quality (encoded) digital video.
Basically, the process involved capturing the raw video into a temporary file and then performing a two-pass encoding using H.264.
Continue reading Capturing Video and Converting to H.264 using ffmpeg