Record old Tapes?

[LoopyWolf]

This is really just a hope, but I somehow got the impression given how nicely SageTV works that it might also have this feature somewhere:

If I get a video input into the system, say from a VCR over S-Video or something, can SageTV record them into MPEGs painlessly?

Thanks

[GKusnick]

Sage can do it, but it's overkill and not especially convenient. You'd have to configure a capture source for your S-Video input and use timed recordings to do the capture.

For digitizing a bunch of old VHS tapes, I found it simpler to set up a capture graph in GraphEdit. This way there's no tricky timing involved; to start it, just click Go in GraphEdit and hit the Play button on your VCR, and when it's done hit both Stop buttons. You can save the graph and reuse it later for more captures.

What sort of analog capture device do you have? That will determine which filters you use in your capture graph.

[Steve52]

I successfuly copied a large group of VHS and S-VHS tapes to mpeg files using SageTv and the timed record feature. I then used another program (TMPGEnc) to convert them to DVD. I takes a while but it worked just fine. The quality is not always great however, due to the source material, not Sage or the DVD authoring software.

[Slack]

If you or someone you know has a ReplayTV 5000/4000 series lying around. It'll do the job. Offload the recordings to a pc, and author a dvd. They are DVD compliant mpgs when recorded at medium quality.