On the fly versus MPEG encoding

[moorthy]

Currently, I'm capturing to AVI using an Aver TV tuner card with the PicVideo MJPEG codec, and my satellite dish receiver as the input.

After that, a lengthy TMPGenc encode (high bitrate) gives me pretty darn good results.

I'm capturing football games (for my own use) but I'm going nuts with how time consuming all of this takes. I capture, edit out the commercials, split the game into two "halfs", and I usually have to leave the computer encoding overnight for two nights (one night for each half).

I'm going to be updating my system soon, and the idea of encoding on-the-fly is intriguing.

Again, my current results are good, and was wondering what I could purchase to maintain that quality level.

The Canopus ADVC-110 A/D Converter has caught my eye.....

Thanks in advance.


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[moorthy]

And....pardon the stupid subject line for this thread. I read it after I hit the "submit post" button, and then it was too late....

Not the best choice of wording.

[jagabo]

If you're going to do on-the-fly encoding you might as well get a hardware MPEG capture device like the Hauppauge PVR series.

[moorthy]

And it will work as well as what I'm doing now?

[freebird73717]

I started out capturing mpeg on the fly with my ati AIW. I had only one hard drive and was limited on space so that was my only option. I got respectable results with my captures.

Recently I bought a couple more hard drives for capture/storage and have ventured into avi/picvideo mjpeg captureing. I encoded my captures overnight and was very pleased with the results.

While the difference was not great, It was enough for me to continue capturing avi.

Having said all that I know there are people on this forum that will say they can not see the difference between avi and mpeg captures.

Quality is subjective. What looks good to one person won't look good to someone else.

My suggestion is to get a card that can capture mpeg and avi both then test. See what looks best to your eyes.

[Bjs]

Your system is fast enough , though it is strange its taking so long to encode those files which suggests something else is getting in the way ... running in the background .

My old amd 2400xp can encode an average movie lenght from avi to mpeg2 in just over 3 hours

Have you tried nero vision to record directly to final output ? .
I know the aver products work well with it .

[jagabo]

And it will work as well as what I'm doing now?

I depends on exactly what you're doing now. If you're using PicVideo's MJPEG at 19 or 20 then performing a good 2-pass encode to MPEG2, a hardware encoder may not be quite as good. Of course, a realtime software MPEG2 capture won't be as good either. But a hardware MPEG2 capture will likely be as good or better than the software MPEG capture.

One big issue will be how touchy the system is while capturing. You won't be able to do much of anything on the computer while capturing DV and encoding to MPEG2. If you start up a web browser or check your email you will likely drop frames. A hardware MPEG2 capture device like the Hauppauge PVR-250 will allow you to use the computer while it's capturing without fear of dropping frames.

[SmokieStover]

TV video is not good enough to waste any more time than necessary to capture and process it. Buy a hardware encoding card and a good mpeg editor (I like VideoReDo) and spend the time you now waste doing something fun......like watching the game, fishing, playing with the kids or grand kids, taking a walk, or whatever.

Better yet, record the game with a VCR, watch it while fast forwarding thru the commercials and the bullshit, then record another one right over the top.

[freebird73717]

TV video is not good enough to waste any more time than necessary to capture and process it. Spend the time you now waste doing something fun......like watching the game, fishing, playing with the kids or grand kids, taking a walk, or whatever.

I waste no time. I set it up to encode before I go to bed. No time wasted because I'm asleep!

[akrako1]

My old amd 2400xp can encode an average movie lenght from avi to mpeg2 in just over 3 hours

Really, a 2hour movie, encoded in just over 3 hours? I'm assuming you're encoding as 1-pass cbr, with the fastest (and worst) motion-search-precision... TMPGEnc can give much better results then this, albeit with a large time expenditure.

For me, with a XP64 3200+, a 2hour avi movie encoded at 2-pass vbr with 'slow' or 'slowest' motion-search precision, probably takes at least 8-10 hours. But the results look as good as possible. For sports, with fast-motion, you'd want all the quality settings trurned up. I don't think my computer minds spending the 10 hours encoding while I sleep.