Capture card w/scriptable commandline app & macrovision warning?

[miamicanes]

Does anybody know whether any of the commonly-available USB2 capture devices (Dazzle, etc) can be launched by commandline (including quality settings, filename, and duration)? For example, something like,

capture.exe --start=now --duration=6.25h --config=c:\foo\settings.cfg --err=err.log outputfile.mpg

Which gets to the second issue... I can live with a device that refuses to record what it sees as macrovision-protected content, as long as it doesn't do it insidiously or abort the entire capture the moment it thinks it sees it. The main thing I'm afraid of is that I'll capture a tape, do a 10 second sanity check on the quality, toss the tape, then 5 months later find out that it has blank blue screens in one or more places. Alternatively, if the capture device at least blanks the screen in a predictable manner (say, blue or green), is there any third-party program I can run to quickly parse through an MPEG file and FIND any occurrences of blanked screens of that color (ideally, in a way that will make it easy to quickly see what came before & after to figure out whether it was just a bad transition between sequential recordings)?

[jagabo]

There is a CLI program called WinTVCap that works with the Hauppauge WinTV PVR series. I've used it with a PVR-250. I'm not sure if it works with the USB series but I suspect it will.

My PVR-250 doesn't pay any attention to MV. Other capture cards I've used in the past would simply stop capturing when the detected MV.

[jman98]

I can tell you that I have never trusted USB capture devices and have always used PCI based cards. Hauppauge makes a variety of cards in the PVR series that are PCI based and give excellent results. I happen to have the PVR-350, but if you don't need TV out, you can get by with the PVR-250 or maybe even the PVR-150. If you must use USB capture devices, I would recommend not doing anything else on the PC that uses USB at the same time as you are recording just to be safe.

I don't have a lot of experience capturing VHS tapes, but my very limited experience is that Macrovision will mess up your capture very quickly. You could use an MPEG editor such as VideoReDo or MPEGVCR (both are available as "try before you buy") and very quickly go forward in the video stream to see if there are any Macrovision based problems. Macrovision will freeze frames during your capture. If you took a random segment in the middle of your capture and watched for 20 seconds, you would certainly see problems during that time if Macrovision is on your tape. I know of no third party program that can do what you want, but it's easy enough to scan the tape in an editor as I suggested. Some capture cards ignore Macrovision, but I don't know which ones do as capturing old VHS tapes is just not very important to me. A web search might provide some helpful info.

Finally, again if you must use USB devices, if you find one you like, do a web search for reviews on it before you buy to be sure that people that have it think it works OK. Dazzle used to make one of the very best PCI based capture cards ever, the old DVC II. I am highly skeptical of all of their USB devices and I would definitely look for some reviews before I would get one. I haven't needed to get a new capture card for 3 years now, but back then I looked a little into USB capture devices and I thought that all of them were subpar. It's possible that they are much better now as I honestly haven't had any reason to do any current research. All I can tell you is that my skepticism is based on how things were 3 years ago, so things may be better now with these devices.