Today there are many articles devoted to video digitization, encoding and processing, including those in Ukrainian. Nevertheless, I am not aware of any complete guide that covers all aspects of the task in question. The closest to the ideal is the Observatory site, but I have a number of complaints to the authors of articles on this site: for example, lack of a healthy conservatism in choosing the video coder (over the last year they changed three “favorite” coders, which are all not compatible with each other). Plus I’d like to bring some of my own experience to the public.
In a sense the material of this article repeats the FAQ on digitizing video at minimal cost, with the correction that the methods described here provide higher quality video and use newer software and hardware. The article also covers a wider range of questions readers may have.
I’ll point out a few articles that describe more expensive options for digitizing and capturing video: Digital Video Archive for Home and FAQ on Creating and Editing Digital Video. They describe a technique using capture cards with hardware video compression and storing the digitized video in MPEG-2, DV or MJPEG format (this allows you to record only 15-20 minutes of video on one CD, so the preferred storage option for digitized video in these cases is recordable DVD). This method is most fully described on M. Afanasenkov’s website. The other extreme – preparing the recordings for compression to relatively low quality VCD/SVCD formats – is described in the article How and From What to Make a VCD/SVCD. The TV & FM tuners site contains descriptions of many models of capture cards and different programs which are used to watch TV programs, listen to the radio, capture video, control your computer with the remote control. The author of the site is constantly monitoring news in the world of TV tapping and video digitizing cards, including the appearance of new models of devices and new versions of programs. The level of presentation on digitization technology leaves much to be desired and loses significantly to the Observatory. On the other hand, if you found this article too complicated – read the articles on the TV & FM tuners website: everything there is simpler and more primitive.
