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

The Author

Rubén Llorente is a mechanical engineer, whose job is to ensure that the security measures of a small clinic's IT infrastructure are both legally compliant and safe. Additionally, he is an OpenBSD enthusiast and a weapon collector.

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