Is it your deepest wish to archive those old VHS cassettes (that you will never watch again anyway) to DVD/HDD and trash them afterward? There is help.

Get a video card, i have a Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-350, which is fine so far.

Unfortunately there is a DMA problem so you have to disable it in the Linux Kernel source (i am serious). This patch is for kernel 2.6.25-gentoo-r8, the ivtv package is kernel-dependent.

Code: hauppauge.patch

It also did not work when a second NIC was in the machine, no idea why...

You need the ivtv and v4l2 drivers from the kernel.

ivtv-ctrl segfaults under root, but works fine as normal user which is sufficient. I had a cable from SCART to S-VHS which did not transmit any sound to the S-VHS input so i transferred the sound via an additional antenna cable from the VCR to the card. The inputs for this were: video 2, audio 0

Now i have a new cable that plugs into the second video jack of the card. The inputs: video 5, audio 1. This one is fine.

If you archive the VHS cassett for some computer illiterate moron, you might want to burn it onto a single DVD to make it easier to understand. It is easy to limit the max file size and select the sample rate:

Code: haupauge-record-dvd.sh

If you record for yourself, you might want to use DIVX for its great compression capabilities. This script will shrink it 3 times more than the MPG/DVD codec above:

Code: haupauge-record-divx.sh

If you want to SEE what comes into your video card use this:

Code: haupauge-showvideo.sh