[H-GEN] getting video off mini-DVs

[Nick Lawrence]

Well, I am making progress!

I have borrowed a JVC camcorder with a firewire output that plugs into my
computer (ubuntu installed on an old iMac)

I ran "dvgrab" from the terminal to grab the video. The result from one
miniDV tape is a series (nine) of 1Gb *.dv files, each about 5 minutes 41
seconds long. It appears to be the raw format for the miniDV video, and is
limited by file size to 1GB chunks?

Now, my job is to concatenate these videos together, and also to convert
them to a more normal video format. (Though I will archive the dv files, as
they are the raw, original format). I would like to have a single mp4 at
the end of the process.

This is where I am having problems.

Avidemux does not open the dv files at all.

Handbrake can convert the dv to mp4, but there are compression artifacts,
like horizontal lines on vertical edges.

mencoder can convert to dv to avi, but introduces horrible blocky
compression artifacts.

My version of ubuntu appears to be missing ffmpeg, and most of the internet
help focuses on ffmpeg. Instead I have avconv, but I don't know how to use
that...

Cheers,
Nick





On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 8:35 AM, Nick Lawrence <n1cklawr3nc3 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hello all,
>
> I have a bunch of mini-DV tapes. But my mini-DV camcorder is broken and I
> cannot use it to extract the video files (it still records though).
>
> Any suggestions for how else I could get the video files off? They don't
> seem to sell mini-DV tape camcorders any more...
>
> Ta,
> Nick
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.humbug.org.au/pipermail/general/attachments/20150606/56c6ef84/attachment.html>