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  1. Member
    Join Date
    Mar 2002
    Location
    Kirkland, WA
    Search Comp PM
    I'm trying to digitize approximately 20 highly valued family videos from Hi8 and high quality VHS (TDK HDX) tapes. I've had okay results with a DVD recorder (and using a since pulled 9600 AIW card on my PC), but not quite as good as I would hope for.

    I have a Hauppauge HVR-1600 tuner card in my PC with which I can record from the 20-some local digital broadcasts I pick up with a UHF roof antenna (I use WatchHDTV instead of the WinTV2000 packaged with the card). Knowing that it has an MPEG-2 encoder on board, I decided to try a capture with that and was not all that impressed.

    However, I captured about 5 minutes of video with what seemed to be default settings on a standard installation of VirtualDubMod (1.5.10.2 build 2542) and was greatly impressed. Unfortunately, that 5 minutes of video was at 15 frames per second and 2 GB in size! When I set it to 29.97 fps the filesize accumulated even faster.

    I've dabbled with VirtualDub in the past (even some flavor called VirtualDub Mpeg), but never felt very comfortable in that environment. Now, after seeing what quality of capture is possible I'm suddenly re-interested.

    The problem is, I can't really afford these kind of file sizes, as a single 2-hour tape would consume well over 150 GB of space at 30 fps.

    Am I doing something wrong?
    Can decent quality captures be made without such huge file sizes?
    What kind of settings would I use and what version/flavor of VDub should I use?
    My ultimate goal is to get MPEG-2 files without much more than cut and splice editing. Is there an easier way to get there without losing too much quality than to capture to AVI and then re-encode?

    Thanks for any help or direction-pointing!
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  2. Member
    Join Date
    Jan 2003
    Location
    India
    Search Comp PM
    use plain virtualdub and a suitable video codec-the picvideo mjpeg codec (Q setting 19) would suit your PC. you can also try HuffYUV or one of the other lossless codecs
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  3. Member
    Join Date
    Mar 2002
    Location
    Kirkland, WA
    Search Comp PM
    Originally Posted by mgh
    use plain virtualdub and a suitable video codec-the picvideo mjpeg codec (Q setting 19) would suit your PC. you can also try HuffYUV or one of the other lossless codecs
    Thanks for the advice.

    If I choose to go with the picvideo mjpeg codec, what file format would I end up with? Would it be easy to convert it to 640x480framesize 30fps 8000kbps MPEG-2 (using something like SUPER)?

    In VirtualDub, is it possible to limit the bitcount (making that term up to characterize a bitrate) of each frame, or is that an unchangeable function of the capture card (raw stream)?

    Thank you!
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  4. Originally Posted by tluxon
    If I choose to go with the picvideo mjpeg codec, what file format would I end up with?
    MJPEG in an AVI container.

    Originally Posted by tluxon
    Would it be easy to convert it to 640x480framesize 30fps 8000kbps MPEG-2 (using something like SUPER)?
    Yes.

    Originally Posted by tluxon
    In VirtualDub, is it possible to limit the bitcount (making that term up to characterize a bitrate) of each frame, or is that an unchangeable function of the capture card (raw stream)?
    You can specify a frame size and sometimes a capture data format (YUY2, RGB, etc.). With MJPEG you specify a quality and the file comes out whatever size is necessary to deliver that quality. Low quality --> small file. High quality --> big file. You'll probably want to use 19 or 20 as an intermediate codec. The files will be pretty large. Especially at 20 which will usually turn out larger than DV AVI.

    With HuffYUV or Lagarith (the latter may be too slow for capture) you get lossless compression and the file size will turn whatever size it does. They do have a few things you can adjust to make the file a little smaller. Slow compression --> smaller file. Fast compression --> bigger file. All settings will usually give larger files than MJPEG.
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