Hauppage PVR-250

I have been slowly converting my family's old VHS tapes to DVD.  I purchased a USB capture card that came with Roxio software for Windows.  The software wasn't the best, but it was easy to use.  I was able to capture mpeg2, which makes it easy to cut into DVD titles.  After capturing two videos, something weird started to occur.  A green line started appearing in the video.  It wasn't solid.  It was a green tint to whatever was behind the line.  It was in the center, was about 5% of the screen height, and it took up the entire width of the video.  I didn't have another VHS player available, so I tried various techniques to diagnose the problem.  The VHS player was also a DVD player, so I popped in a DVD and the green line was still there. I couldn't be 100% sure it was the capture card, but it was a good guess.

I decided to put my old Hauppage PVR-250 card into the computer.  I purchased this card in 2004 for my home-built MythTV DVR.  Putting that card into the computer was a long shot.  I stopped using the card 3 years ago when I got FiOS, since it was no longer usable.  The card has been sitting in my damp basement out in the open.  No static bag or any sort of cover.  I was very happy to learn that it still worked!

The fun thing about the PVR-250 is the /dev/video* device nodes dump raw mpeg2.  This means I could use the cat command to record video.  Cat is so much better than the Windows software.  People who tell me that the command line is useless will never know the joys of:

#!/bin/sh
cat /dev/video24 > "$1" &
pid=$!
sleep "$2"
kill $pid


Nothing beats using simple software with great hardware.