Warning about YouTube Tutorials

[dellsam34]

I just want to share a link to a Youtube video of a guy (most likely very young) that is showing the best way to "digitize" miniDV tapes using Linux, because according to him miniDV tapes are not digital and the only way to get the best quality is to use Linux not Windows OS.

This is the kind of videos feeding wrong informations to people and they come here confused with a lot of questions. This is just one area of the many areas of videos about video that we discuss here.

This video is probably stemmed from this one that claims batch conversion of DV tapes using Linux when in fact all he is doing is transferring tapes manually one by one just like you would do with WinDV or Sclive, He even used the exact same shape of USB flash drive, Coincidence?

While there is nothing wrong with transferring DV/D8 tapes to computer using Linux, Claiming it is better quality or faster than normal ways is not, Actually it is slightly complicated and longer since you have to type in commands for every function when you can do it with a click of a mouse using WinDV or ScLive.

[pandy]

Actually it is slightly complicated and longer since you have to type in commands for every function when you can do it with a click of a mouse using WinDV or ScLive.

This depend on your script skills - my impression is that at some point it is faster to use script than GUI but i think this is up to personal preferences and perhaps age (when i was younger i also avoided scripts but at some point this shifted in opposite direction)

[dellsam34]

Still doesn't make it faster though or better quality, This is the point. Also pointing out the miss information.

[oln]

It's not any better quality but with dvgrab you can actually make it automatically rewind and start playback and capture automatically while you have to start playback manually with windv. May be doable with sclive but I've not used it. In practice it's gonna be mostly the same though, probably up to whatever one is more comfortable with. Driver-wise it may be a bit simpler on linux since it should just work out of the box after installing dvgrab doesn't require any extra driver setup unlike on windows.

The ffmpeg command he used to convert to mp4 may also not be ideal since it will encode 4:2:2 h.264 for NTSC DV recordings which not everything supports.

At least the method shown will get you properly captured video though, theyre not suggesting capturing it with an analog dongle to some crappy format with the bundled app, it could be way way worse.

[Bwaak]

It's not any better quality but with dvgrab you can actually make it automatically rewind and start playback and capture automatically while you have to start playback manually with windv.

In Windows Movie Maker capture module you can specify "Capture the complete tape", and it will rewind it and capture the whole thing from the beginning.

[oln]

Yeah you can with several older apps like older iMovie and possibly pinnacle studio and such but not sure if any of that runs on a modern OS and from what I remember some of them made it clunky to dump the raw dv files and/or insisted on splitting the import into clips so are a bit less practical if you just want to batch dump tapes into single files without having to spin up an old version of windows or OS X.

[Darryl In Canada]

I just finished this tutorial video to address the problem of lack of YouTube videos advocating the DigitalFAQ/Lord Smurf Method, for lack of better term. I would appreciate feedback. I tried to present what I understand to be the best practices in a way that a beginner can understand.

https://youtu.be/pKYNqZdqawc