[MPlayer-users] Digitizing VHS tapes with mencoder

[Josef Wolf]

Hello,

I am about to digitize my VHS tapes. Since this are old family recordings, I'd
like to have the best quality I can get.

I thought I'd do that in two passes. First, grab the recording with "copy"
encoder. In the second pass I'd do the deinterlace/encoding/etc to shrink
the recordings to acceptable size.

So for the grab, I tried this command line:

 mencoder tv:// -tv
 driver=v4l2:input=1:width=768:height=576:outfmt=yuy2:norm=pal:buffersize=100:forceaudio:alsa:adevice=hw.0,0,0:amode=1:immediatemode=0 \
 -oac copy -ovc copy -of avi -ofps 25 -o video.avi

But this complains really often about duplicated frames and dropped frames.
I am somewhat concerned about those error messages. Will this have a big
impact on recording quality?

BTW: I've seen various resolution recommendations for PAL varying from
     384x288 to 768x576. What is the correct setting?