Capturing Karaoke Laserdisc Tracks A Little Advice Please

[bilbo]

Hi Guys

I have a pile of Pioneer Karaoke laserdisc's (NTSC) that I would like to bring into the 21st century
As technology has changed so much I'm looking for a little 21st century advice to go with it.
As an entertainer here in the UK I use a program called Virtual DJ to playback my music videos. These are in all sorts of shapes, sizes & formats, h264, mpeg4, mpeg2 etc, all of which are managed well by the player.
What I had in mind was creating something like 720 x 480 or 640 x 480 MP4 files, The main thing is that the audio is as near to perfect as possible.

Is there a device out there that will let me do this in one run. (one track at a time) x 2800) Is the frame rate an issue or does my software automatically compensate.

All my computers are gutsy performers, running Win7 64bit, Output to secondary monitors via HDMI or VGA

Thanks to all in advance

Steve

[JVRaines]

You can use pretty much any basic USB dongle to convert the composite video, but as they only have analog RCA inputs for audio, you'll want a sound card with digital input (depending on your player) to capture the PCM tracks.

[ozymango]

What I had in mind was creating something like 720 x 480 or 640 x 480 MP4 files, The main thing is that the audio is as near to perfect as possible.

Is there a device out there that will let me do this in one run. (one track at a time) x 2800) Is the frame rate an issue or does my software automatically compensate.

Hi, Steve. I can't do it in one device, but I can do it in two; as for which two devices, it depends on how cheap and/or PC hardware savvy you are. But this is definitely doable and not too expensive.

Although quick first question: I'm assuming your (Karaoke model?) LD player does not have an optical or coaxial digital output, that we're talking about line-level (red and white phono plugs)? Because if you've got an LD player with digital audio output I want it, I could never afford one. Anyway if you do have an LD player with digital output, let me know, I'll have to work up a different guide.

But let's go with red/white phono plugs for audio -- we'll run the audio from these jacks into one of these, our first device:

http://www.musiciansfriend.com/pro-audio/behringer-u-control-uca222-usb-audio-interface

Thirty bucks and worth every penny -- audio from LD player goes in the input jacks, plug the USB cable into your PC, and then you set the recording sample and bit rate on your system to 2 channel, 16bit, 48khz (DVD quality audio).

Second device is your video input capture device, this can be pretty much anything that people recommend on these forums. Me, for LD I used an old Compro capture card that I paid $10 for on eBay; you don't need to use the S-Video output/input from LD to the capture device, composite usually actually looks better.

Then download/install a copy of Virtual Dub and the Huffy codec, set your capture file to 640x480, 29.97fps, and set your audio for raw input, 48khz -- that'll give you PCM audio tracks that are very, very damn sweet and clean.

Record your clips, verify that they play back clean with VLC player, they'll be huge but then install Handbrake on your PC, drop your clips into it, and the default settings to mp4/mkv are quite excellent.

I did the above for an LD I lucked across recently, "Peter, Paul, & Mary: A Holiday Celebration" that I couldn't find on DVD (or rather the DVD copies I've found seem to be from VHS masters, bleah) and the audio on the LD was gorgeous, I wanted to preserve it, and the above method made for fabulous audio.

If this sounds even remotely interesting to you and you'd like more specific details on how I rigged everything together, just let me know, I'll spout on ad infinitum.