Capture problems with AIW Radeon

[cgsauer]

I hope someone can help with this.

I'm trying to capture then burn to svcd. I am using an AIW Radeon card and ATI Multimedia Center 7.6. I have it set on mpeg-2, 480x480, 4.0Mps. At a constant bit rate I can caputure something that looks fine when I play it on my computer, but then when I burn it it looks like its in slow motion. (I get very little dropped frames). Also, with this setting the time of recording doubles, meaning it counts by 2 seconds every second. When I try to change to variable I get 80%+ of dropped frames. I've tried changing the rate to 2.4Mbps and even went down to 1.15 and couldn't get it to work any better. Let me know if you have any questions or any ideas on what to do.

Cary Sauer
P4 1.6
30 Gig HD for burninig only (7200)

[Mirror_Image]

Assuming you are capturing material for burning to SVCD, you'd probably have to re-encode anyway, and you could consider trying a capture in 352x480 MPEG-2 4.80 Mbit VBR (I believe the ATI preset is called "Half Height Resolution [HHR]" or something similar). That's what I use to cap (with MMC 7.7, but 7.6 should also have that preset) programs off Cable TV for later re-encoding to either VCD or SVCD. I couldn't tell the difference between a 480x480 and 352x480 cap (at similar bitrates) after both were re-encoded to SVCD-compliant size and bitrate.

Give it a try - you have nothing to lose but your time (and not much of that).

[cgsauer]

After I capture then what do I do to encode, I thought that by captureing at mpeg-2 I could just edit the commercials out and then burn to a svcd.

[Mirror_Image]

Well, at 480x480 MPEG-2 you could cut the commercials and burn - if your bitrate wasn't too high (though you might have to demux+remux). SVCD usually uses VBR to make the files smaller in the low-motion spots (but can use CBR) and has a max of:

Max 2524 kbit/sec MPEG-2 (if the audio is in 224 kbit/s), audio + video bitrate max bitrate is 2748 kbit/s (some DVD players get cranky if you approach this limit too closely).

I use a slightly lower rate of 2375 VBR video / 224 CBR audio (2599 max audio+video), because it's a Ulead VS6 preset, and I'm really lazy.

The rub to capping at a bit rate that low (2524) is that your end product SVCD generally won't look as good as capping at a higher bitrate and then converting down to SVCD-compliant bitrates, letting your encoder (TMPGEnc or whatever you use, even UVS6 like my slothful self) decide how and where to vary the bitrate to keep as much detail as it can. Yes, this takes more time, so if you are primarily concerned with cap/edit/burn ASAP than you might not want to go this route.

[Mirror_Image]

(By the way, with a decent settings template, TMPGEnc will make better quality encodes than UVS6, but I go for the lazy man's UVS6 edit/encode/menu/burn integrated solution.)