VHS capture

[nanifra]

Hi all.
I'm starting capturing old VHS tapes to backup them in DivX format because I've bought a DivX standalone player
My computer is a P3 1000MHz, using a separate dedicated HDD, VirtualVCR and a FlyVideo 3000 card. This should be quite enough for my task: capturing at 352x288 25fps mono audio.
The resulting quality I get is almost acceptable but I get video artifacts even in slow-motion scenes. The bitrate I use is about 1100. How can I get rid of these artifacts? I have seen DVD-rips with higher resolution and lower bitrate, performing better!
Thanks to all!

[steveryan]

This is just a guess but are you capturing directly to Divx? Try capturing with the Huffy codec and then re-encode to Divx. Might be worth a try.

[IGGYMAN]

You should try to capture at higer bitrates 4000 or more and then reencode it to lower bitrate.

[FulciLives]

This is just a guess but are you capturing directly to Divx? Try capturing with the Huffy codec and then re-encode to Divx. Might be worth a try.

I agree. Capture with HuffyUV or an MJPEG codec such as PICVideo MJPEG

Set your audio to 48k 16-bit Stereo PCM WAV audio

Now you have an AVI file that you can convert to DivX using 2-pass or multi-pass mode which will give you better quality than a CBR encode done in realtime.

Also you might consider doing a capture at full D1 resolution (720x576) and then resize that to 640x480 for the Divx ... this will give you much better quality but you might have to up the bitrate just a bit (I'd try around 1500kbps). For the audio I would go with 192kbps CBR MP3 format.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[Perro Grande]

Yep -- capture at the absolute highest resolution and bit-rate you can achieve without dropping significant numbers of frames. A lossless codec like Huffy is ideal for such an endeavor.

Capture big, scrunch down to small size later when real-time processing is no longer a requirement.