[pienter]

I am trying to digitalise some VHS tapes and although the picture transfers well, there is no sound. The problem is not in the VCR as this works perfectly when connected to a TV set. I feed the signal from the VCR to the PC using a Scart to 3x RCA cable at the VCR end and a purple breakout cable, supplied with an ATI All-in-Wonder Radeon 9200 , connected to the graphics card VidIn socket. The VidOut socket of this card is linked to a Creative SB Audigy card LineIn socket using another supplied ATI cable. The output is viewed onscreen using Ulead VideoStudio v.11. The pictures appear perfectly and can be recorded for further editing but there is no accompanying sound despite the fact that the Ulead thumbnail in the edit line shows a small white loudspeaker, If the audio is split out, the line is smooth without oscillations. I have tried a direct connection between the audio out sockets of the VCR and the breakout cable in case there was a fault in the Scart cable but without success.I have also tried taking a line direct from the VCR audio output to the sound card LineIn socket and still didn't get any sound from my speakers or see any audio via Ulead
The PC sound system works satisfactorily in all other respects. Am I missing something somewhere, for example a software setting ?

[sheeba666]

The best way to capture analogue video under any operating system is with a firewire analogue video adapter such as Canopus ADVC 110. This supposedly gives much better picture quality than most of the PCI capture cards but these adapters are still quite expensive at the time of writing. If you plan to do a lot of analogue video capture then it may well be worth the extra cost. Under linux you could then just use dvgrab to capture from one of these but I'm not covering that method here.

The first step, of course, is to connect your VCR to your PC. Most TV capture cards have three types of video input: s-video, composite (the yellow one) and TV aerial. s-video gives the best quality of the three so use that if you can. I have an Avermedia TV Capture 98 PCI capture card which is based on the bt878 chipset. The picture I get with this card is quite grainy and I hear that the saa713x chipset capture cards are supposed to be much better- see the v4l2 wiki link above for card recommendations and compatibility. Another thing about this card is that I couldn't get it to find my VCR signal through the aerial connector and so I had to use a SCART to composite cable.

After plugging your VCR into your PC (including running an auxiliary cable from your VCRs sound outputs to your PCs mic in) insert a VHS tape, push play and start tvtime to check you are getting a picture and sound. If you are trying to get a picture through an aerial cable then you will probably have to scan through the channels but this isn't normally neccessary with composite and s-video. If there is no sound then you will need to open your mixer program (like alsamixer) and turn up the mic input levels.
_________________________________________
holidays in st lucia
buy steriod

[DerekC]

I haven't used Ulead, but the one time I ran into this problem, I was using WinDVR and a Pixelview TV tuner. I ended up having to change the sound input device within WinDVR from CD Player to Line-in. Maybe Ulead has a similar setting?