mainconcept 1.4 capturing guide ... your input requested

[lordsmurf]

I'm making a dozen or so new guides. This is one of them. Now, I don't have an external card anymore, and I don't want to test one yet. But I'd like the guide out sooner than later. I'll test on a few things next month probably.

These are minimum specs to achieve good quality captures with ZERO DROPPED FRAMES. Tested using an AVerMedia or ATI AIW 7200 card. Internal cards. This was done in MC 1.4.1. System is P4 1.8, Windows XP Pro, 1GB RDRAM, 600GB HD space (captured onto an ATA drive and a motherboard drive, 7200 rpm drives). If I raise the settings too much, I get drops. With MC, dropps create sync errors, as ONLY the video drops, not the audio too.

The output I got was quite nice, especially considering this was pure software encoding, no help of any kind from any hardware assist or pure hardware.

What do you do? Do you have any input on any of the settings?


























Please leave me the following pieces of info:
1. Your CPU model/speed
2. Your capture card
3. Your RAM
4. Your OS
5. Your HD space, capture drive location, drive rpms
6. Any frame drops at all ?

Thanks.
It's about time we have a good guide for this often-overlooked software.

[Roderz]

Haha.. I was thinking for writing a guide for this myself (2 lazy)as Mainconcept is all I seem to use nowadays.
I do all my caps with Mainconcept and the setting you'v shown would give good results, I have managed to cap at ful D1 16:9 @ about 4800Kbs (any more and I droped frames) and result were ok (low quality 8mm cam footage shot at night)
but most stuff I cap @ 1/2 D1 @about 3500kbs
bearing in mind I capture to a very old WD 9gig 5200 HD! (used for nothing else and formated afterwards)
I'm sure if I got a new HD I could increase the settings - but don't do that much capturing @ the mo
comp specs are 2.1G AMD, Rad 7200 VIVO, 768 RAM (333mhz) W2k,

[lordsmurf]

I thought for sure I'd get more responses by now.
I guess I'll just check back in a few days.

[DVD_Ripper]

I primarily use the MPEG Capture software to capture and convert from my DV Device (Sony camcoder) via firewire. If I do a 20 minute capture it will buffer about 10 minutes and once video is done playing it will then continue to process for another 10 minutes or so.

My Video Settings are full dvd (720), VBR anywhere from a min of 2500 to a max of 8000 with an average of 6000. All with zero dropped frames. My std settings are min of 2.5k, max of 6k and an avg of 4k. seems to work well

I have not tried 1/2D1 yet and have been astonished by the quality of the MPEG.

[lordsmurf]

So I'll assume buffering is a good idea then. I really need to get some external cards to play with.

[DVD_Ripper]

So I'll assume buffering is a good idea then. I really need to get some external cards to play with.

Yea... if not it would have dropped left and right... not sure if there was a setting or if it is done automatically.

[zael]

I Think a good MainConcept 1.4 guide for Mpeg2 caps is what we need, and it's welcome.

I've been doing some realtime Mpeg2 capturing testing with MainConcept 1.4.2 from TV shows. Basically I'm using some specs I read from Satstorm and I've had good results:

Video Capture Device ->
- Video Standard: NTSC_M
- Frame Rate: 29.97
- Color space/Compression: YUY2
- Output size: 720 x 480

Audio Capture Device ->
- Audio Mixer Input -> Line In

Capture ->
- Preview during capture: unchecked
- Compression-> Video: MainConcept Mpeg Encoder ->

Basic Settings->
- Video Type: MPEG-2
- Video Encoder Quality: 21

Video Settings->
- Frame Rate: non drop-frame rate
- Aspect ratio: 4:3 display
- Frame size: 352 x 480
- Bitrate type: Variable
- Variable bitrate: Max 5000, Avg 3500, Min 2500

Advanced Video Settings->
- Input video is RGB16-235: unchecked

Everything else is left as default.

No dropped-frames. My System is:
Athlon XP2100 (1.7 GHz), 384Mb RAM, Radeon 7200 AGP, 2 x 40Gb HD 5200rpm, Windows XP Pro.
The capture card I'm using is an Avermedia TVPhone PCI (old but works better than my WinTV-Go card) with Avermedia's drivers (Taiwan site) since give me better performance than the btwincap drivers when capturing AVI's with IUvcr (maybe with MainConcept too).

With all that I've got good results but I'm still trying to improve them (best quality, less disk space and no dropped-frames).

Jose Luis.

[lordsmurf]

So I'll assume buffering is a good idea then. I really need to get some external cards to play with.

Yea... if not it would have dropped left and right... not sure if there was a setting or if it is done automatically.

There is a setting to check/uncheck when you chose the DV type and encode type.