what is the best format when capture from tv show?

[sumeshkri]

I have got pixel view installed in my pc. with the help of ulead video studio i capture tv shows. i later convert the episodes to dvd format video and keep on disks. suggest me the best format to which i can save the tv show- captured files. whether it should be mpeg or vcd? . of course it is difficult to save as dvd at the first instance since it needs a lot of HDD space. Moreover i want to edit the episodes to avoid unwanted parts.I occationaly sit and then convert .kindly help. thanks in advance.

[guns1inger]

Personally, I wouldn't convert anything except youtube clips to VCD. You get better quality from VHS.

[Baldrick]

edit: never mind.

[guns1inger]

If your editing needs are simple, capture at the final bitrate you need as mpeg-2 at full-D1 resolution. Use an mepg-2 editor such as Womble or VideoRedo to edit out commercials etc. Author and burn, and you are done.

If you have the HDD space and CPU power then you can get better quality by capturing to a lossless format and encoding to mpeg-2 after editing, but that takes a lot longer and may not be worth your time.

[sumeshkri]

lossless format. i couldn't get it. what do you suggest? to save the clips as dvd or vcd? kidnly explain.
thankjs

[guns1inger]

Personally, I think VCD is a worthless, dead format unless you are archiving youtube clips for some perverse reason.

Others disagree as they believe there is a place for archiving at a (substantially) lower quality material that they don't watch frequently. Again, my personal opinion, if it is worth keeping, it is worth keeping at the highest quality. If you care so little about it that VCD quality is good enough, then you really don't care about it at all. You would get higher quality keeping it on VHS instead.

[jman98]

I would suggest capturing the video at 720x576, MPEG-2, 8100 Kbps CBR (Constant Bit Rate), with an audio bit rate of at least 256 Kbps if your audio can only be recorded as MPEG-1 layer II audio. Edit the video to remove commercials. Then re-encode the video to a lower bit rate to fit on your DVD.

VCD is lower quality than DVD. There is no reason to save these videos as VCD unless maybe you want to do so because CD-Rs are cheap, but you will only be able to put 80 minutes of VCD video on an 80 minute CD-R. You could easily put 2 hours of vide or even more (with a lower bit rate of course) on a DVD disc.

[DarrellS]

Since the new versions of Virtualdub have come out that will do exact frame editing in smart render mode without having to recode my captures, I've been capturing straight to DivX 6.5 with my ATI AIW and cutting out the commercials since I can burn these files to Data DVD and view them on my Philips 5140 DVP.

[sumeshkri]

as suggested by jman i would like to ask
if we capture at a higher bitrate then if we lower the bitrate ,dont you think that the quaality will suffer a great, this i have heared from somwhere.plz suggest from your personla experience. thanks.

[themaster1]

As crazy as this may sound for you, i'd say the capture card you have is not well suited for what you wanna do with it.

Analog c. cards are good for transfering vhs/laserdics-> digital formats. Other than that, forget about it.

You better focus on buying a card which support dvb-t, dvb-s or atsc
They don't need crazy cpu resources, you don't need to reencode (depending on the channels)/good quality, the files are smaller...the advantages are many.

But if you insist i'd say 1) forget about vcd 2) maybe a non standard svcd would be a wise choice something like 3000kps/ 224 kps for video & audio

It all depends of your hdd capacity i guess but you know , if you have a small hdd forget about recording videos. it's like people trying to watch an Hd net stream with a 56k modem lol, that kills me

[sumeshkri]

thanks a lot for the suggestions