Automate VHS capture in VLC (or anywhere)

Question

I am currently undergoing a project converting all my parents old home movies on VHS to DVD (and also putting them on a harddrive), we have hundreds of these things and they are all around 2 hours long so naturally I want to try and make my process as painless as possible.

I have device called the EzGrabber for streaming from a vcr to my computer and the software that comes with it, the software works but is very bare-bones and consists of basically a start recording and stop recording button. I would like to be able to set a timer so that I can stop recording after >2hours has passed so I don't have to be around every time I am capturing a movie.

So my question is:

If I use VLC to capture instead does it offer this capability? ie Can I set it to capture from my device for a certain time period and then stop? If so how?

If not is there a way to automate tasks within an application (third-party) to happen after a time period? (In this case stopping recording in VLC or the EzGrabber software) If so how? (Possible ideas are a shell script)

Sorry if this is a vague/stupid question I just don't really know how to approach this. The machine I am using is running Windows Vista if that is at all relevant.

Solution

vlc has a command line option you could use

--stop-time= Stop time
The stream will stop at this position (in seconds)

or possibly

--run-time= Run time
The stream will run this duration (in seconds).

One of them likely does what you want. I think you can give extra command line options in the open file/stream (or what it's named) dialogue, otherwise you could use the actual cli.

(source)

Comments

[kalyan]

thanks, the run-time command is what I was looking for in vlc, as for the second part of my question I found an app called WinParrot (freeware) that records user actions and can play them back (similar to automator in OS X I think), it also has some commands that you can use during playback (in my case wait(<time in ms>) was useful). I think I will be using this and my the EzGrabber software for my project simply because my mother needs to do it when I go back to school so it needs to be as simple as possible.