Automatic Capture and Convert Digital Camcorder Video

Introduction

There are hundreds of software applications that can capture Digital Video from a IEEE 1394 camcorder (pretty much any camcorder after analog hi-8, before MPEG camcorder era). Some for money and others for free. However, faced with several shoe boxes full of Mini-DV tapes, what I needed was a nearly automatic system. Like pop-in the cassette to the camcorder (which is connected to the computer via IEEE 1394 cable) and `press a button' to get the whole content of the cassette captured, deinterlaced and transcoded to MPEG-4 -- a format that is far more suitable for computer storage and playback. The reason is simple, if you do something for one time, clicking buttons on a nice user interface is fun (If you like to do this you can use kino for capture and handbrake for transcoding.), but the fun wears off quickly when you try to do the same for fifty times (=fifty miniDV tapes) in a consistent manner.

Software needed

For my approach I needed three pieces of software:

• dvgrab - for (obvious) task of grabbing dv from tapes to hard drive.
• dvcont - for controlling the camcorder from the computer.
• HandBrakeCLI - commandline version of handbrake software for transcoding the video.

In my current Ubuntu 10.10 system, the whole installation requires two commands.

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:stebbins/handbrake-releases  # as explained at https://edge.launchpad.net/~stebbins/+archive/handbrake-releases
sudo apt-get install HandBrakeCLI dvcont dvgrab