Need Help Capturing with VirtualDub and Hauppauge WinTV via Svideo

[ibAdam]

Ok I've been trying to do this video conversion project for over a year now. I only seem to get a few hours a month to sit down and work on this. I'm pretty green with video capturing but spent a lot of time trying to research the forums. I've got a Hauppauge WinTV HVR-1600 with Svideo, Coax and audio jack input. I've been trying to get a stack of Hi8 tapes converted and I have successfully captured video with Hauppauge's WinTV version 7 and VirtualDub version 1.9.10. The problem is the video quality is bad and with VirtualDub (even with Huffy v2.1.1) the files are HUGE. I was hoping to have the videos at less than 20gigs per hour. Here is my problem with the two capture applications and I need advice on what settings I should try.

With VirtualDub I get these horazantal lines that don't line up.



With Hauppauge's WinTV 7 it captures in MPEG2 as opposed to VirtualDub's AVI so the video is much smaller. However I'm getting these real bad blocks that appear randomly throughout the shot. The WinTV 7 help said to change the video rendering and try the hardware acceleration setting both on and off. I changed the video rendering from the default of EVR to VMR9 to VMR7 and to Overlay. No matter what the results were the same.

[Brad]

The horizontal lines are supposed to be there. The term is "interlacing". Usually you want to leave it in the video you encode and deinterlace during playback. Typical video card hardware will deinterlace MPEG-2 for display but not AVI. Something like VLC can perform its own deinterlacing on AVI if you enable it.

Don't know about the blocks, those are funky-looking.

[jagabo]

"Interlaced" is the natural state of video. Each frame of video contains two separate pictures, one in all the even scan lines, one in all the odd scanlines, called fields. If there is any motion between the time the two pictures were taken the two fields don't "line up". You don't see the resulting "comb artifacts" on a TV because TVs display only one field at a time -- first one field, then the other.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlaced_video

Computers don't normally deal with interlaced video, but rather progressive video where the entire frame is a single picture. So computers display the entire frame at once. That's why you see the comb artifacts on a computer. You can overcome that problem by using a player that deinterlaces on-the-fly.

If you're going to make a DVD leave the video interlaced. Doing so will give the smoothest motions (60 different image per second rather than the 30 different images per second you would get after deinterlacing) DVD players and TVs will deal with it properly. DVD playing software on a computer will usually deal with it properly too.

[ibAdam]

Is there a way to calibrate or bring the interlaced lines together (shift them left or right)? I have a basic understand about the TV showing the lines at different times I just don't get why they are not lined up smoothly. It looks like the odd lines are not lined up or in sync with the even lines. It's really apparent with vertical objects like the door frame where it is really rough. That only happens with VirtualDub going to an AVI. WinTV 7 going to MPEG doesn't do it (I just get the bad blocks). Is there any setting or filter I can add to VirtualDub to clean up this affect? Also could it be anything with the video resolution it is being set to? I mean by default VirtualDub wants to render the movie as 720x480. These are Hi8 tapes and I'm not sure if that is the proper resolution.

[themaster1]

I think it's possible to shift left/right the lines with avisynth although i have never tried this.What you might wanna look for is an external tbc. Your process is good imo capturing with vdub in huffyuv then to enhance all that i suggest you learn a bit of avisynth a.k.a the ultimate tool for that kind of work and free.

720x480 that's ntsc SD that should do it. Also consider using another software than wintv for capturing in mpeg2

[jagabo]

There are smart "motion compensated" deinterlacers that can attempt to align information from the two fields. They work pretty well with some material, not well with others. Keep in mind the two fields come from different pictures and different points in time so it's not as simple as shifting one of the fields to the side (in your sample it may be, because it looks like the camera was panning sideways). In fact, the two fields don't even have to have anything to do with one another. For example, one field could be from a movie and the other field could be the ad that follows.

WinTV recording to MPEG is either deinterlacing before making the MPEG (in which case you are losing half the motion information, ie 30 images per second vs 60 images per second), or the player is deinterlacing during playback. In either case the result looks pretty poor. Look at the thin, near horizontal edges on and around the door. Notice how they are fuzzy and jagged? I'm not sure what's causing those other spots on the picture. They look like encoding or decoding errors.

Since you a using VirtualDub you can try using its deinterlace flter. You'll probably find that Yadif mode works best.

The best deinterlacing filters are in AviSynth. It will take a little time to learn how to use AviSynth -- a script (text) based video filtering language.

If you want to upload short AVI and MPG samples I'll take a look at them and tell you exactly what's going on and how you might address it.