[H-GEN] getting video off mini-DVs

[Paul Brown]

Have you tried playing the raw DV files with VLC to check the original quality?  DV is compressed (around 5:1?) and the compression artefacts are visible on a good TV/monitor.  http://www.videolan.org/vlc/index.en_GB.html

Have you tried tweaking Handbrake so it does less compression (also ensure you keep the original frame speed)?  There’s a lot of stuff you can play with here to improve quality.

If you can run Mac OS on your iMac then a lot of people recommend: http://www.wondershare.net/ad/video-editor-win/index.html - it can input and edit DV format with a range of output options.  Also for PC but not Linux.

Adobe Premiere should allow you to edit raw DV files and output to a file format of your choice - it will recompress though this quality can be adjusted.  It ain’t cheap.

This is a guess (I’ve never tried it) but you might be better off converting/editing to MKV (Blu-Ray format) and then post compressing to a more usable format (though VLS plays MKV - it plays just about every format).

Hope this helps
Paul




On 6 Jun 2015, at 07:36, Nick Lawrence <n1cklawr3nc3 at gmail.com> wrote:

> [ Humbug *General* list - semi-serious discussions about Humbug and     ]
> [ Unix-related topics. Posts from non-subscribed addresses will vanish. ]
> 
> 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
> 
> 
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====
Paul Brown
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Honorary Visiting Professor - Sussex University
http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/ccnr/research/creativity.html
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