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by elagost 1781 days ago
dvgrab is awesome! I used it quite a bit recently, transferring old tapes on to more reliable media. Sometimes it the tape had an error and I had to rewind a bit and restart capture, but it mostly just worked.

Be warned, it does produce pretty large raw files, though, so after import, I ran ffmpeg to convert them all to mp4 files. No visible loss in quality, and about 90% size reduction.

2 comments

I did something similar, except I ran it as dvgrab | ffmpeg to transfer and transcode to mp4 at the same time, one step. It worked great.
dvgrab is great for set-and-forget archiving MiniDV tapes.

betamaxthetape mentioned[0] DVRescue[1] which looks very useful for error correction. The tools expect the raw .dv files, so check before compressing.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27971246 [1] https://github.com/mipops/dvrescue