Uploaded November 2013 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
I'm testing my Betamax digitizing setup. This tape was recorded somewhere near Bendigo, Victoria ca 1998. Remember when ad breaks were short?
The setup is a Sony SL-C5 Betamax recorder, a KeyWest Big VooDoo TBC and a generic SAA7134 based video capture card. Because the capture card isn't great, I connected it to the TBC with S-Video. This prevents dot crawl and other noise from getting into the digitized recording.
The command to encode from the card to an MPEG file is this:
mencoder tv:///2 -o $1 -ovc x264 -oac mp3lame -tv brightness=-30:contrast=-20:amode=1:alsa -channels 1 -noskip
The -noskip switch is critical to getting a smooth recording. The x264 encoder definitely provides better encoding quality and small file sizes, but you need a fast processor to encode in real time.
Edit: Adding -mc 0 as a switch to mencoder appears to fix the A/V sync issue, which is obvious in this recording.
I'm testing my Betamax digitizing setup. This tape was recorded somewhere near Bendigo, Victoria ca 1998. Remember when ad breaks were short?
The setup is a Sony SL-C5 Betamax recorder, a KeyWest Big VooDoo TBC and a generic SAA7134 based video capture card. Because the capture card isn't great, I connected it to the TBC with S-Video. This prevents dot crawl and other noise from getting into the digitized recording.
The command to encode from the card to an MPEG file is this:
mencoder tv:///2 -o $1 -ovc x264 -oac mp3lame -tv brightness=-30:contrast=-20:amode=1:alsa -channels 1 -noskip
The -noskip switch is critical to getting a smooth recording. The x264 encoder definitely provides better encoding quality and small file sizes, but you need a fast processor to encode in real time.
Edit: Adding -mc 0 as a switch to mencoder appears to fix the A/V sync issue, which is obvious in this recording.
