Saving Your Analog Data from Oblivion
Conclusion
Saving your old VHS tapes or audio cassettes is quite easy with minimal hardware expenses. Although video and audio encoding and analog to digital conversion is surrounded by a lot of black magic, this article should provide a starting point to converting your old VHS tapes for personal use.
You can easily use the procedure presented here to save audio cassettes just by capturing and encoding the audio by selecting a suitable codec, such as Ogg, FLAC, or Opus, and a suitable container. Matroska does the trick (in fact, files with the mka
extension are Matroska files with audio-only content), but its use for this purpose is not widespread.
If the steps presented here look too cumbersome to perform manually, you can always use the LinuxTV's V4L capturing script [8] to automate the process.
Infos
- PAL region: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAL_region
- NTSC region: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTSC#Countries_and_territories_that_are_using_or_once_used_NTSC
- Different EasyCAP devices: https://linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/Easycap
- Why GStreamer is better at encoding: https://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/GStreamer#Why_is_GStreamer_better_at_encoding
- Compatibility: https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/H.264#Compatibility
- Keyframes: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/MeGUI/x264_Settings#keyint
- Matroska metadata examples: https://www.matroska.org/technical/specs/tagging/example-video.html
- V4L capturing script: https://linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/V4L_capturing/script
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