MPEG2 Capture

[jeffh123]

I have an AverMedia AVerTV USB2.0 Plus video capture device. I want to use it to capture DVD compliant MPEG2. Anyone know of a FREE software tool to achieve such capture ? It would be able to vary resolution, bit rate, quality.

Thanks in advance.

[Baldrick]

Moving you to our capturing section.

Nope. I don't know any free mpeg2 capturing utility.

[hech54]

That old thing came with Ulead Movie Factory 2SE.

[themaster1]

What about VLC ? Vlc is a video player and can also capture video from a capture card (mp4, mpeg2 etc..) but i haven't test much

[hech54]

Ulead Movie Factory 2SE was very popular on Ebay many years ago when DVD Recorders first came out. It allowed AC3 pass-thru and it would actually edit a +RW disc ON THE DISC....no need to make an intermediate copy or even change the disc in the drive.
I don't see any on Ebay right now.
I still have my original disc here....saved it all these years.

[usually_quiet]

What about VLC ? Vlc is a video player and can also capture video from a capture card (mp4, mpeg2 etc..) but i haven't test much

I have tried VLC for capture. VLC's MPEG-2 encoder doesn't offer many settings and only uses I-frames and P-frames.

The hard part is finding a suitable free MPEG-2 encoder to use with good free capture software. The only free MPEG-2 encoder I have found is part of an older version of ffdshow, ffdshow rev 3631 dated 20101115. (Newer versions of ffdshow don't offer an MPEG-2 encoder.) I'm not sure its good enough to meet the OP's criteria. It offers the choice of a quality setting, or a bitrate setting, but I don't see a setting to change the resolution.

[jman98]

Honestly I'm too lazy to do the research, but some guy in Russia wrote a commercial capture program back in the early 2000s that could do MPEG-2 captures on some, but not all, video capture cards. It might still be listed somewhere in our Tools section but I don't remember the name of it. The OP can do the work to try to find it if he really is interested.

If I remember correctly, I think that VirtualDubMod could actually do MPEG-2 captures on a few capture cards. Whether it worked or not depended on a variety of factors and you basically just had to try it and see what happened with your card.