Reducing Size of .mpg Video Capture Without Losing Quality

[JonnyAlpha]

Hi;

and I am using it to capture from VHSs and Mini DV and I would like to capture in the same quality as the VHS / Mini DV recordings.

I have taken advice a long time ago using my setup for capturing and it seems to work fine.
My capture card is a Hauppage HVR-1300 and I am using WinTV v7 as the capture software (nothing else seems to work with the HVR-1300) everything in WinTV is default except that I have setup advanced settings to Auto Convert MPEG-2 Recordings to .mpg.

I have also enabled 3rd Part Decoders (not sure why I have done this) and it is using MainConcept (HCW) MPEG-2 Video for MPEG-2 Video and Hauppauge MPEG Layer-1/2 Audio for MPEG1 Audio.

With these settings an 8 min capture is 456MB!!!

The clip details are shown in the attached screen shot but are as follows:

VIDEO
Length: 00:08:04
Frame Width: 720
Frame Height: 576
Data Rate: 8500Kbps
Total Bitrate: 8884Kbps
Frame Rate: 25 frames/second

AUDIO
Bit rate: 384Kbps
Channels: 2 (Stereo)
Audio Sample Rate: 48Khz

If I change the decoders would I get better compression? If so what would you recommend that would work with this capture card?

Many thanks

[manono]

You've already lost considerable quality by capturing to MPEG. You'll lose more quality by reencoding at a lower bitrate. You may or may not notice the difference.

With these settings an 8 min capture is 456MB!!!

That's not a lot. Try capping lossless sometime. I don't know the card and don't know if it has settings to capture at a lower bitrate. If it does, use that. If it doesn't, the only way to get a smaller size is to reencode at a lower bitrate. You may want to filter it to remove noise and fix colors and/or other things. If so, you should cap at the highest bitrate it allows and then reencode to the final bitrate at the same time fixing what needs fixing.

[JonnyAlpha]

You've already lost considerable quality by capturing to MPEG. You'll lose more quality by reencoding at a lower bitrate. You may or may not notice the difference.

With these settings an 8 min capture is 456MB!!!

That's not a lot. Try capping lossless sometime. I don't know the card and don't know if it has settings to capture at a lower bitrate. If it does, use that. If it doesn't, the only way to get a smaller size is to reencode at a lower bitrate. You may want to filter it to remove noise and fix colors and/or other things. If so, you should cap at the highest bitrate it allows and then reencode to the final bitrate at the same time fixing what needs fixing.

The HVR-1300 has an onboard hardware encoder that automatically decodes to .mpg, I do not know if there is any software that can be used with this card to capture direct to .AVI in fact because of the onboard decoder and as it auto captures in .mpg things like Virtual Dub don't work. Last time I looked the only software that could be used was WinTV??

[usually_quiet]

Hi;

and I am using it to capture from VHSs and Mini DV and I would like to capture in the same quality as the VHS / Mini DV recordings.

I have taken advice a long time ago using my setup for capturing and it seems to work fine.
My capture card is a Hauppage HVR-1300 and I am using WinTV v7 as the capture software (nothing else seems to work with the HVR-1300) everything in WinTV is default except that I have setup advanced settings to Auto Convert MPEG-2 Recordings to .mpg.

I have also enabled 3rd Part Decoders (not sure why I have done this) and it is using MainConcept (HCW) MPEG-2 Video for MPEG-2 Video and Hauppauge MPEG Layer-1/2 Audio for MPEG1 Audio.

With these settings an 8 min capture is 456MB!!!

The clip details are shown in the attached screen shot but are as follows:

VIDEO
Length: 00:08:04
Frame Width: 720
Frame Height: 576
Data Rate: 8500Kbps
Total Bitrate: 8884Kbps
Frame Rate: 25 frames/second

AUDIO
Bit rate: 384Kbps
Channels: 2 (Stereo)
Audio Sample Rate: 48Khz

If I change the decoders would I get better compression? If so what would you recommend that would work with this capture card?

Many thanks

The decoders used by WinTV 7 won't have any effect on the size of your video. They don't play any part in encoding the video. They are used only for displaying the video and audio. The hardware encoder's settings alone determine the filesize. To decrease the file size, you will have to reduce the bitrate by using a lower quality setting in WinTV v7. The quality of the capture will be lower too, but that is unavoidable if you want smaller capture files.

As you said, because the Hauppauge HVR-1300 has a hardware encoder and the drivers apparently don't provide an option for uncompressed output, you will not be able to find any software for AVI capture that works with your card. There are probably only a few third-party capture programs able to work with the Hauppauge HVR-1300 for analog capture using its hardware encoder, and most will be PVR-type TV recording software

Windows Media Center will work for MPEG-2 capture, but encoding options are limited and you probably don't want to use it because capture from an analog input requires an MCE USB IR receiver/IR blaster to be installed. Cyberlink PowerDirector works with my Hauppauge HVR-2250, which also only performs hardware encoding, but there was just one encoding option, DVD HQ. I have only tried them with DTV tuners but GB-PVR and NextPVR support the Hauppauge HVR-1300 for analog capture.

Building a filter graph in GraphEdit or GraphStudio would give you the most control over the hardware encoder, but figuring out how to build one that works takes time. This link has basic instructions for building filter graphs for a different Hauppauge capture device, but proved helpful to me: http://www.shspvr.com/graph_build/mepg_cc.html (GraphStudio is a bit nicer to use than Graphedit, but they are very similar in most respects.) I haven't quite gotten a filter graph that works for my HVR-2250 but hopefully someday I'll find time to complete it.

[JonnyAlpha]

Thanks very much for the comprehensive, building a Graph Editor may be a bit heavy for me but if I EVER get some spare time I'll have a go