Geeks are GREAT Lovers

I’ve got a Canon HV20 high definition (1080i) digital camera and I’ve been working on getting video from the camera up to google using Linux.  The tools provided by windows vista are lacking to say the least.  There are a couple of good tools that make getting the video off the cam easy.

First you have to get the high definition off of the cam.  For this I use dvgrab.  The important thing to remember is that for high definition you must specify the -f hdv command line option.  The exact command line I used is:

dvgrab -f hdv -a -timecode <FILENAME>

This takes the imput from the first channel (firewire) and automatically appends the date and time of the recording to the filename provided.  Each time a new recording is detected it automatically starts a new file.  Pretty handy if you want to take the video off a whole tape at once.  The video that is left is in a very large format and not really worth much.  It is in high definition which is 1280×1080 in my case and doesn’t play well in anything excluding VLC media player.  The files are huge and unless they are very short in duration YouTube won’t let you upload them.  To get them in to a more reasonable size I use a utility called tovid.  My main goal here is to try to get the video files on to a regular DVD, or up to a video site like Google Video or YouTube.  The first thing I do is take all of the raw HD files and back them up to my NAS.  After that I take the files one at a time and convert them.  The command I use for that is:

tovid -ffmpeg -interlaced_bf -ntsc -dvd -wide -noask -in <INFILE> -out <OUTFILE>

I’ve found that using ffmpeg does a better job of syncing the sound with the video.  The options are pretty self explanitory.  The output is a DVD formatted video file which is much more playable by typical video players and of a much more manageable size.  A simple cat command will put any videos together that you want to make in to one.  Once you do that though you’ll have to use the above to fix the SCR before you can put them on a DVD.  I’m in the middle of figuring out exactly what tool to use to actually get the files to a DVD.  Once I figure that out I’ll update.

Posted by geek / Geek and Video