HPR4185: Archiving VCR or any other RCA media
Archiving VCR or any other RCA media After my Father passed away, I volunteered to archive his Video Cassette Recorder (VCR) collection to disk for the family. You might be aware that Europe used Phase Alternating Line (PAL) is a colour encoding system for analog television. It was one of three major analogue colour television standards, the others being NTSC and SECAM. Ireland used PAL-I, a version based on CCIR System I, which meant that none of the VCR players in the Netherlands would work. So in addition to having to carry 113 Video Cassettes on a RyanAir Flight, I also needed to bring the Video Player as well. Hardware RSA Connector to your media device RSA2HDMI card. HDMI to USB Capture Card. These are the ones I used but I don't recommend them one way or the other. The parts are fairly generic so use what you can get. Connection First drop to a console and list the connected usb devices $ lsusb | sort | tee before.txt Connect the VCR with RSA Cables to the AV2HDMI converter. Connect the AV2HDMI converter with a HDMI cable to the HDMI2USB converter. Connect the HDMI2USB converter to a Linux PC with a usb cable. After waiting a few seconds, you can list the usb devices again and do a diff to see which has been added. $ lsusb | sort | tee after.txt $ diff before.txt after.txt 11a12 > Bus 003 Device 021: ID 534d:2109 MacroSilicon USB Video While we know the USB device ID, we now need to know if/how the hardware is mapped into Linux. We need a way to be able to identify which /dev/video? device I need to capture from. First unplug the HDMI2USB capture card, and get a list of the video devices. $ for i in /sys/class/video4linux/video*/device/uevent ;do echo "${i} ===";cat "${i}";done | tee before.txt Plug back in the card and give it a few seconds to be recognised. Then run the same command and diff the output to see the differences. $ for i in /sys/class/video4linux/video*/device/uevent ;do echo "${i} ===";cat "${i}";done | tee after.txt $ diff before.txt after.txt 28a29,42 > /sys/class/video4linux/video4/device/uevent === > DEVTYPE=usb_interface > DRIVER=uvcvideo > PRODUCT=534d/2109/2100 > TYPE=239/2/1 > INTERFACE=14/1/0 > MODALIAS=usb:v534Dp2109d2100dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc01ip00in00 > /sys/class/video4linux/video5/device/uevent === > DEVTYPE=usb_interface > DRIVER=uvcvideo > PRODUCT=534d/2109/2100 > TYPE=239/2/1 > INTERFACE=14/1/0 > MODALIAS=usb:v534Dp2109d2100dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc01ip00in00 In my case I'm interested in the PRODUCT=534d/2109/2100. From which we can find the changing path, which in this case is /sys/class/video4linux/video5/ Similarly we also need to know which ALSA Audio Device it exposed. Again unplug the HDMI2USB capture card, and get a list of the audio devices. $ arecord -l | tee before.txt Plug back in the