How should I encode some TV shows I captured?

[JRW160]

I captured some TV shows using my Leadtek Winfast 200XP TV card. I captured them in MPEG-2 format. I tried to comvert them to DivX using Virtualdub, but the audio was lagging behind the video in the latter part of the show. How should I encode these files? Each one is over 2GB and about an hour worth of TV. Is there something else I need to do in Virtualdub to get the audio to sync correctly with the vide?

[FulciLives]

I captured some TV shows using my Leadtek Winfast 200XP TV card. I captured them in MPEG-2 format. I tried to comvert them to DivX using Virtualdub, but the audio was lagging behind the video in the latter part of the show. How should I encode these files? Each one is over 2GB and about an hour worth of TV. Is there something else I need to do in Virtualdub to get the audio to sync correctly with the vide?

I assume you have some sort of DVD software player such as PowerDVD or WinDVD ... so ... when you play back the original MPEG-2 file (the captured file) is the audio in synch then? ... or ... does the audio only get out-of-synch AFTER encoding it to DivX?

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[JRW160]

The audio is only out of sync after I encode the file.

[FulciLives]

The audio is only out of sync after I encode the file.

Well since the original capture is in-sync then you are A-OK

If you ask me the best method of converting MPEG-2 to DivX would be through the use of GORDIAN KNOT

You can find guides on how to use GORDIAN KNOT on the doom9 website

It makes the whole process very easy to do.

One note ... the guide for GORDIAN KNOT (last time I read it) it tuned to doing DVD back-ups from VOB files but you can run your MPEG-2 file through DVD2AVI just like you would do ripped DVD VOB files.

If you audio is MP2 then you will want to probably convert it to MP3 for the DivX. Something like BeSweet should be able to do this. Please note that you may have to first convert your MP2 to a WAV file then convert to MP3 but I'm not sure but that is a work around if you have problems going straight from MP2 to MP3.

Anyways do the sound first then encode the video since you will already know the final size of your audio file and can better estimate the video bitrate you should use to target your final file size.

In my opion ... for best quality ... go for 640x480 size (assuming your MPEG-2 capture was standard D1 resolution of 720x480/576) and set your final file size to 700MB (or 690 to be safe so that it will fit on a single CD-R disc).

You could put two TV episodes on one CD-R but quaity will suffer unless you edit out the commercials ... then they will be a good 15 minutes shorter each (about 44 mins instead of 60 mins). Then that might give you good quality to target 350MB each (I'd do 340MB each to be safe) so you can fit 2 on a single CD-R disc.

Good Luck!

- John "FulciLives" Coleman