Alain Kelder is a Giant Dork

Painlessly extract dv video and convert to mp4 with two commands, unattended

I've got a crappy old dv camcorder that we've been using to film our wakeboarding. The video quality is crap by modern standards, but good enough as a training tool.

There are a ton of video capture and processing tools packaged for Debian and easily installed with apt-get. After trying a few, I've found dvgrab and ffmpeg to work well with minimal effort on my part.

My workflow:

• Go wakeboarding and have lots of fun (don't forget to film)
• Go home
• With the lens cap on, hit record for a few seconds (this will produce a short black clip, which can be used to easily identify where today's riding ended and any clips following this one can be discarded)
• Hit "rewind" on the camcorder, attach to computer with a firewire cable
• Run dvgrab to extract the video. The following command will automatically split the video along pauses (super handy as it saves me from manually extracting each rider's section):

  dvgrab -f raw -autosplit -size 0 -showstatus
  

• Run ffmpeg to convert raw dv into mp4

  for f in *dv; do
   ffmpeg -i $f -threads 0 -acodec libfaac -ab 96k -vcodec libx264 $f.mp4
  done
  

• rsync to web server (or dropbox or some such) for sharing

That's it, extraction and conversion achieved with just two commands, running unattended so I'm free to do other things.