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Capture PC

About

This is the machine everything hooks up to for capture and processing of audio and video data.

It is not a powerhouse and there are a few things I can do to make my life a hell of a lot easier, all of which are listed in to ToDo section.

Its actually turned out to be quite useful for this kind of stuff - it has 2 PCI slots which means I get to take advantage of some of the higher quality retro capture components (TV cards etc) as apposed to dealing with some of the ‘less quality’ USB stuff that floats around these days.

Specification

  • Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS
  • Gigabyte Z87-D3HP-CF
  • Intel Core i5-4570 @ 3.20GHz
  • 28gb RAM
  • 110 GB SSD
  • 3 TB HDD
  • SAPPHIRE TRI-X OC 100362-2SR Radeon R9 290 4GB
  • Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-1300-DVB-T
  • FIREWIRE CARD

Ubuntu??

Yup. Given the age of some of the cards I figured this would give me the best chance of interfacing with them.

This also gives me access to Bash, with which I’ve been able to massively automate my capture workflow - especially when it comes to VHS tapes and Teletext.

Machine history

This PC was previously our main gaming set up, custom built by a local computer shop for us (support your local shops!).

Faults

Note: This is not exhaustive, these are only the faults and fixes I’ve experienced.

PSU fan

Its a rattly bugger. Short term fix has been to.. err… keep the PC laying on its side.

OBS not using hardware encoding

Although the GPU is running fine on the desktop now (this took a while to sort out - HDMI wouldn’t output anything from Gnome but I’m now hooked up with DisplayPort), OBS doesn’t give me any options for hardware encoding. I need to address this.

No CUDA cores

Deconvolving Teletext captures is HARD. Thankfully the wonderful vhs-teletext toolset supports the use of CUDA cores for this. Unfortunately this machine currently has an AMD card.

I don’t actually know what bang-for-buck card to go for for this, but would be very nice to get a speed boost in that part of the process.

Camcorder not detected over FireWire.

Currently I can only capture the camcorder over component. Given that its a DV camera, this is far from ideal. Unfortunately I’ve yet to find a combination card/cable which allows me to capture yet.

ToDo

  • Enable hardware encoding in OBS
  • Upgrade to an NVidia card with CUDA cores (for teletext processing)
  • Replace the rattling PSU (and possibly all fans)
  • Get camera working over FireWire