My third Linux Magazine article to be published, titled Saving Your Analog Data from Oblivion, is scheduled for issue #219.
Saving Your Analog Data from Oblivion was born when I realized I had a impressive collection of old VHS movies growing dust on my shelves. I thought it was time to purchase an audiovisual capture card and digitize those films. After ordering a cheap card, I started looking for software to use for the task in hand. Soon I realized that, while there is a lot of quality software that could do the trick on Linux, in order to get the best results you need to take lots of factors into account and get some basic knowledge on color encoding and multimedia codecs.
After finding a workflow that worked for me and digitizing my first shelf, I realized that I could as well document the process that turns an old decomposing VHS tape into a shiny 21st Century Matroska file. The end result is Saving Your Analog Data from Oblivion, and the reason why I think it is awesome is because it does not only tell you how to do it, but it also provides examples and side notes explaining why the examples are the way they are.