Question - Capturing to MPEG directly with VHS cropping

[joejoe]

I have the Encore ENLTV-FM card , I know that is a cheap card but for what I want it does its job, I mean just to transfer my VHS to DVD. I’m not looking for super quality just to pass my old vhs to dvd.

I can capture mpeg directly ( with the software included ) and I’m quite pleased with the output but my only problem is that I can’t crop the video while I’m capturing, you know to remove the borders of the vhs frame. Something I can do when I capture avi with Virtualdub. But I as said I wanna do it directly to mpeg.

My question is, is there a way I can capture mpeg with the right cropping at the same time whether using the same software, a hacked software or any other software or trick?

Any help will be highly appreciated, thanks in advance, Joe.

[PuzZLeR]

Until someone can provide a direct capture solution with settings, if they exist, I would suggest in the interim going the re-encoding route with a better capture method instead.

To crop with your existing setup you'd need to re-encode MPEG-2 -> MPEG-2, which would indeed be quite lossy.

I see you can capture to AVI. Can you access the VFW library?

Instead, use something like a lossless format, or DV-AVI, for your capturing. The files will be bigger, but that will be only temporary as you will want to re-encode to MPEG-2 anyway. And your results will be better.

It's not a direct solution, but at least this way you can do it with better captures and higher quality retentions (even if wasn't only just to crop).

[joejoe]

Thanks puzzler for your answer, it was just out of laziness. I know the avi way it's the right thing to do.