Problems with quality of captured video

[petarone]

Hey, I'm having a problem with the quality of my captured video, the quality of the video my TV tuner records is not the same as the signal I get on my PC.
The main problem that appears is in moments where there is lots of action, and looks like there isn't enough kbps to support it, kind of squares appear, you know the ones, like I said they mostly appear when there is low kbps. I record the video in Mepg 2 with 6000 kbps, but still not the best quality, should I upgrade to Mpeg 4, could you give me some other suggestions.
Thanks

[redwudz]

What's your capture card? And what software are you using for capture?

If you are using the PC to capture to MPEG-2 in software, check your CPU usage in Task Manager to see if it's maxed out. If it's a problem with CPU speed, it won't help to go to MPEG-4 as that takes even more computing power to encode. 6000kbps should be high enough for a decent capture in MPEG-2, depending on the resolution.

Can you capture it in AVI format? Maybe PicVideo or Huffy. The downside of that is it needs a lot of space and you still have to re-encode it if you want MPEG-2 format.

Another option is to lower your capture resolution. Try 352 x 576 if you are presently using 720 x 576. You may not lose that much resolution, but you may get rid of the 'macroblocking'.

And welcome to our forums.

[mats.hogberg]

Also even very light noise in the picture eats bitrate like h*ll - You must have a good strong signal in to your TV tuner.

/Mats

[jimbucc]

I looked at your profile and noticed you had one drive - is this still true and are you capturing to your system drive?

If so, I would consider getting another drive - fast 7200RPM SATA or IDE drive - just for capture. This will help with the quality since captured video requires a lot of disk space and IO and if the drive has to contend with system calls to the hard disk the video will lose.

Also, turn off all unnecessary apps - try EnditAll.

Jim