advice for DirecTV capturing

[Operationz]

hey guys, I'm finally gonna break down and buy a capture card. yes I've read the capturing guides and the capture cards comparison. however, I need some advice on what I'll be doing: capturing from DirecTV, to be later converted to MPEG1 or MPEG2 and also converting my old vhs tapes to MPEG1. can someone give their opinions on what are the best and inexpensive cards for the job?
I'm debating on either an ATI TV wonder, or Pinnacle DV-10+

[gimp]

I have a All-in-wonder radeon 32ddr. I bought for the same thing, but I have problems with it. I can capture very good from Direct TV & VCR's or other but I can't get the damn things to conveert and play when I burn them. I wish I went ahead and got a higher end card!!!

[Dman65]

Gimp,

Are you sure your player is compatible with CD-R or CD-RW?

I don't think the card ytou captured with would affect whether or not the final product could be played on a DVD player unless you were using a hardware compression card.

[Operationz]

does anyone have any more advice to give??????

[alucard2050]

i have the ati tv wonder. i have dish network hooked directly to it. i have captured useing all different kinds of setting. so far the best i've found is useing the huffy codec. for me, it is next to perfect picture. except the file is in avi which is VERY large. from what i understand capture cards usually capture the same. quality depends on how your capturing. software, and what your pc is able to support. ati tv wonder is about 40 bucks. try a couple different ones to see what you like. you can always return them if you don't like them....

[alucard2050]

also, if you do get the ati card. do not install the software that came with it. go to the ati site and download the updated drivers and capturing software..

[Operationz]

thanks for the advice guys. I think I am gonna go with the ATI TV wonder for now, capture in huffYUV, and convert from there. I'd love to just be able to do RT capturing of directv to MPEG2, since that's the native compression format, but right now $$$ is tight, especially in times such as these. by the way, my machine is an amd athlon 1.5ghz, 384mb ddr,2 30gig ibms and a hercules geforce 2gts, all on an iwill board

[Operationz]

alucard2050, one more question for you: will the ATI TV wonder do VCR to VCD conversions???

[tww1]

Well you can do what you want but best way to go is the WIN TV GO card have 4 of them doing differance things with works GREAT VirDub Tmpeg and Nero no problem at all.

[Operationz]

tww1, the card you mentioned seems to have impressive features but there's one problem: PAL tv format
if this card is limited to that format, then for me it's useless

[alucard2050]

hmmm. i havn't tried to capture in pal. i'm not to familare with the pal format. someone else might know. i just havn't tried it.

[Operationz]

ok I scored the ati tv wonder w/video capture. so far it captures DTV perfectly with my only complaint being the audio quality; dolby prologic sounds a bit soft and staticy but it's quickly cleaned up with tooLame or Tmpgenc. anyways, you can select which format to capture in: ntsc or pal. however, DTV doesn't broadcast in pal so that kinda capture doesn't work. one problem I have yet to solve though: virtualdub refuses to recognize the capture card. I've tried enabling/disabling overlay controls for my geforce card, checked/unchecked the box that says "check here if you are having problems with your tv tuner" and still nothing. I've searched v-dub's knowledge base and can't seem to find an answer. can anyone else help me with this????

[wingstar]

what driver files are you using for the TV wonder addon? Make sure that you have the driver that has VFW support for the darn card. ATI is notorious for that ( they decide to drop support for VFW over WDM for the sake of technology advancement ).

[alucard2050]

i have the same problem with virtualdub. where can i get the driver that has VFW support. can i just browse the internet for it or is there a specific place where i can get it?

[Operationz]

wingstar, can you tell us where to find the drivers??
right now, I'm using ati's MMC 7.1 which I got from the website. help!!!!!

[Silvije]

Here is the answer to yuor problem!

http://www.virtualdub.org/virtualdub_news_old.html

[Operationz]

thanks for the link, Silvije!
alucard, I'll let you know what's up when I try this tonight. by the way....castlevania SOTN was a wonderful game

[alucard2050]

Operationz- HA HA HA. you are the second person that has caught onto my name. Funny how not to many people notice the detial things. anyway, i'm gonna check the link also. i've heard so many good things about virtualdub and its been driving me nuts cause i couldn't get it to work.....

[alucard2050]

Operationz---looks like alot of things i don't understand. i'll just see if it works for you.

[Operationz]

alucard, hey man I can't do it tonight
I'm running NT and I refuse to upgrade to 2000 pro, so I'll need access to either a 2000 or a 98se box. in the latter case, I'll have that tomorrow so I'll post results then.
yeah SOTN is one of the all-time greats, no doubt about it!
the voiceovers, the insane 2D graphics, 2 castles, the ridiculous amount of weapons, armor and shields.....konami at their best

[gimp]

Gimps back here!!!!!

Been fixing problems I can capture, burn, & watch all with pleasing results. I did a Fdisk and went from there. Everything is all good. Except for one *&^%$#@ problem (MACROVISION) I don't know how yall guys are hooking up the DIRECT TV but I get better results going thru S-Video & Audio cables instead of the straight coaxial hookup. I also installed the new drivers from ATI they crash the capture device everytime. So I went back to what came w/the card 4.13.7075 for the adapter driver & 4.13.5085 for everything else.

[alucard2050]

hey gimp. if MMC7 is not working correctly, the only thing I can think of that can be causing you problems that for MMC7 to work properly, the old drivers for previous versions MUST be completly out before the new drivers for MMC7 are installed. if thats what your talking about thats crashing your system. as far as the macrovision. i have dish network and run it directly into my capture card with RCA cables. regular coax cable just doesn't do the video any justice.

[gimp]

Hey Alucard2050,, I wiped everything out when I installed the new drivers 4.13.7114 I think when I went to capture as soon as I hit the record button I got the message ATIMMC has performed a illegal op. never failed. So I went back to what came with my card not the first problem yet!!! I have a ? what settings do you capture. I do everything mostly VCD compliant 352x240 NTSC(525) like the setup in the how to capture w/ATI AIW, this does a good job but I want better results. I expiermented changing the capture res. to 480x480 left everything else the same captured with <1% frames dropped it's looks very good but in fast action scenes it gets very pixeled. What can you recommend?? I fixed my macrovision problem SIMA Video Copy Master $40.00 at Circuit City!!!!!

[alucard2050]

whats up gimp? to be honest, i was useing the Huffy codec and capturing in AVI 320x240. VERY large files but the picture was next to perfect and when i encoded it useing TMPGE, the finished product was very good. but, i tried some tweaking and for some reason i am no longer able to capture in AVI. get the error,"Not enough space on disk". beats me, i have the same amount of space as before. well, i did some more testing and decided to try mpeg2, 640x240, ntsc(525), 12.04 M Bit/second, 44,100KHz, 16 bit, stereo
in my opinion, i am getting a better picture with that then in the AVI. the AVI for some reason had little but noticable lines in it and when i encoded the lines would disappere but the image was a little fuzzy. now with mpeg2 the lines are gone in the capture, crystal clear picture.
here's my encoding, mpeg1, 352x240, 2500 cbr bitrate, motion search-very slow, video arrange method-full screen, check on noise reduction, audio at 44,100 128. even when reducing from mpeg2-mpeg1 the quality is still very good. with these settings i am still able to burn it as a standard compliant and 2500 is the max bitrate my APEX can read..i think i am now satisfied after about 1000 tests. my goal was to have the best quality i could, standard complient vcd, and about a 90 min. movie on 2 cdr's....

[Operationz]

gimp, you say you get dropped frames from capturing at 480X480?? that's my ultimate goal: to capture directly to 480X480 MPEG2 which just so happens to be directv's native broadcast. I think my computer is up to it, meaning it's fast enough and I have the drivespace etc, but frameloss sucks pornstar **** and we can't have that! currently, I'm using ATI's 7.1 MMC and capturing just beautiful VCD's in 352X240 1.5Mb. I mean it, they're awesome for being 1.5Mb!! after capturing, the only thing I do occaisionally is demux and remux but not all the time. I have my capture card connected to dtv via s-video and rca stereo cables.
anyways, I'm gonna try the v-dub fix that you posted here earlier and try alucard's avi capture method. 12.04Mb/second would be awesome video, no doubt there, but since I gotta load it up in Tmpgenc or CCE later on to do an SVCD, I'm gonna try a lower bitrate of 2.5Mb/second instead. I'll post results when finished

[alucard2050]

Operationz- thats one advantage you have by having an s-video. i am only useing the tv-wonder ve card, highest i can go is rca. i know there's a difference from coax-rca so there's probably one hell of a difference from rca-s-video. i hope like hell the v-dub fix works. and one more thing, only way i am able to capture at 12.04MB/second is if i do NOTHING else on my pc. if i do then i drop frames. if i went any higher and still did nothing i would drop frames. so thats the best i can get till i can get 480x480.....

[Operationz]

alucard, the s-video does help and you can definately see the results, but composite is still better than using coaxial only! anyways, the v-dub fix didn't work!! but I only tried it on win98se. I did the reg changes and edited system.ini but still nothing!! guess this fix only works for 2000pro

[gimp]

What V-Dub fix are yall talking about??????????

[Kwulabear]

My dad has a AIW 32meg DDR Radeon. He captures beautiful tv with it. Albit alittle long process. About 2 1/2 hours from capture to record on cd for a 1/2 hour show.

He doesn't use MMC. He captures with MGI videowave 4 720x480 mpeg2 NTSC using the S-video cable from his dish. Then uses tmpgenc to convert it to SVCD 480x480. The result is a near dvd quality or as best you can from his dish. No blockiness. No frame drops.

The only problem is you can only get about a hour till you hit the 4gb limit. Which if it's something with commercials that wouldn't be a problem as you stop and start again.

[themamboman]

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On 2001-09-15 19:13:27, Operationz wrote:
does anyone have any more advice to give??????
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Well, here's how I cap from DirecTV. I have a Dazzle DVC2

- S-video output from DTV to DVC2
- cap using the DVD profile in DVC2 (720x480, 8Mbs)
- Edit out commercials with Womble MPEG2VCR
- Use DVD2AVI to make a d2v file and also demux the audio
- load d2v and mpeg audio into tmpegenc 12a
- set for svcd (480x480, CQ_VBR 2300/1700/95) and other settings (10bit dc precision, interlaced output, interlaced input even field first, floating point conversion, convert to ycrcb, etc)
- demux after encoding, remux with bbmpeg 1.24b18
- use TSCV and latest beta vcdimager 0.7.9 to make the cue/bin
- burn with fireburner