Update on Windows capturing

[Lebon14]

Hi.

I am part of an archival society and we do lots of digitalization. Part of this work is to also transfer miniDV. However, we have two machines with FireWire and both are on Windows. One is on Windows XP (yes...) and the other on Windows 7. We bought a deck from the Deck Guide only to find out it wasn't being recognized on the Windows 7 machine. The deck is a Sony HVR-M25U - fyi. Because it is not written aaaaaaaaanywheeeeeeeeeere that capturing on Windows is not supported, I had found out after receiving it when DVrescue still gave me "no deck detected" and searched Google and to find this thread which reference issue #445 . So, now, I'm stuck with sticking with ScenAnalyzer.

So, what's the status of the capturing on Windows? Is it coming soon? We have a huge batch of those miniDVs to do and we would much rather like to use DVrescue than ScenAnalyzer.

Thanks.

[JohnstonJ]

I'm just another user, but I've been able to get started using DVRescue on Windows by using alternative capture tools.

My workflow has been this:

1. Use the old WinDV tool to capture the tape to an AVI file. Settings are as follows:
   1. Capture to Type 1 AVI file
   2. Discontinuity threshold: 0 (always capture to a single file; ignore timecode discontinuities)
   3. Max AVI size: 1000000 (the highest possible value; this is several hours of NTSC video)
   4. Every N-th frame: 1
2. AVI files can apparently be loaded into DVRescue, but some features did not seem to work properly. AVI is a rather deprecated format anyway, so I immediately unwrap it using FFmpeg to a bare DV file:

ffmpeg -nostdin -i <name of input AVI file> -map 0:v:0 -c copy -f rawvideo - > <name of output DV file>.dv

(this is copied from:)

dvrescue/tools/dvpackager

Line 894 in 8e09e0e

"${FFMPEG_PATH}" -nostdin "${FFMPEG_VERBOSE[@]}" -i "$i" -map 0:v:0 -c copy -f rawvideo - >> "${OUTPUTNAME}"

3. Now you have a bare DV file that you can load into DVRescue for analysis, merging, packaging, etc. I would imagine this can be expected to work just as well as DV files that were captured directly by DVRescue.

[dericed]

ha, you already unpackage it that way :D. In your case you can drop the - >. I was using - >> for conditions where multiple input files are being output to a single concatenated dv stream.

[Lebon14]

I was not looking into alternatives / workarounds and I strictly want to work with a UI. Adding so much steps in the transfers would make things greatly inneficient as I do this for a job and my boss wouldn't be so keen for me to bang my head a week long trying to figure out why a commandline didn't work. I have a VERY SHORT temper when it comes to CLI. Because I absolutely hate it (even if you give it to me).

So, I was looking to see if there was going to NATIVE Windows recording with DVRescue because it's definitely the OS that has become the easier to work with, today (if you re-install the legacy Windows drivers in Win11 that is or have a PC with an older OS)

For now, I stick with ScenAlyzer. It does what I want in the end - I would just have loved to have a better tool with error checking / re-recording built-in.

[libbyhopfauf]

@Lebon14 The Windows/Linux version requires different background tools for that OS and you might need to check the Ubuntu permissions. However, so far this has only consistently resolved capture on Windows for the CLI as noted in our documentation. Please let us know if this allows you to capture via Windows with a duel boot using the DVRescue GUI. Testing would be helpful.

[libbyhopfauf]

I'm just another user, but I've been able to get started using DVRescue on Windows by using alternative capture tools.

My workflow has been this:

1. Use the old WinDV tool to capture the tape to an AVI file. Settings are as follows:

   1. Capture to Type 1 AVI file
   2. Discontinuity threshold: 0 (always capture to a single file; ignore timecode discontinuities)
   3. Max AVI size: 1000000 (the highest possible value; this is several hours of NTSC video)
   4. Every N-th frame: 1

2. AVI files can apparently be loaded into DVRescue, but some features did not seem to work properly. AVI is a rather deprecated format anyway, so I immediately unwrap it using FFmpeg to a bare DV file:

ffmpeg -nostdin -i <name of input AVI file> -map 0:v:0 -c copy -f rawvideo - > <name of output DV file>.dv

(this is copied from:)

dvrescue/tools/dvpackager

Line 894 in 8e09e0e

"${FFMPEG_PATH}" -nostdin "${FFMPEG_VERBOSE[@]}" -i "$i" -map 0:v:0 -c copy -f rawvideo - >> "${OUTPUTNAME}"

3. Now you have a bare DV file that you can load into DVRescue for analysis, merging, packaging, etc. I would imagine this can be expected to work just as well as DV files that were captured directly by DVRescue.

@arnicholson will you please add this to the documentation for Windows DV capture as an alternative option until we figure out the DVRescue GUI for people who don't want to use the CLI?