vcr

A tool for converting VHS tapes over a capture device using ffmpeg.

This is a very light layer over ffmpeg that is tightly constrained to my own
workflow. It’s unlikely to be useful in a general context, but others might
benefit from seeing my process. Basically:

1. Start the VCR and this program at the same time. e.g.,
   vcr -t 3:00:00 me.mp4 to record for 3 hours and then stop.
2. Do an initial capture into an mkv format. This permits watching the
   capture while ffmpeg is encoding it.
3. Blend the the final capture with a still “blue” image, and run ffmpeg’s
   blackdetect filter over it. The result of this should tells us where
   the actual video ends.
4. Trim the trailing blue frames and, in the process, re-encode the video as
   mp4 for maximum portability.

Various ffmpeg settings are hard-coded, although some things—like video or
audio device location—can be controlled on the command line.

Each step of the above process is intended to be idempotent and the process can
be resumed via the --resume flag. Otherwise, a new job will always be
created. Generally speaking, vcr will preserve every intermediate artifact.
The motivation for this is that capturing video is a time intensive process, so
bugs later in the pipeline shouldn’t cause outputs earlier in the pipeline to
become unusable.

Maintenance

This project is intended for my own personal use, and I likely won’t accept
feature requests or bug reports. I post it here for the purposes of sharing
only.