Capturing straight to DIVIX

[alexb]

I have captured a few videos from VHS to VCD. I capture straight to Divix5 and then convert to XVCD(352x288 increased bitrate). The quality is not bad but it is worse than original VHS.

My question is would i be able to get better quality if i use different codec to capture.(PiCvideo, Huffy....)

[DRfrankenpimp]

try morgan multimedia mjpeg codec,its a lot better than pic mjpeg.

[MrKGB]

I also tried this method, but it looks like divx is optimized for very low bitrate, so the result was not good.
Most of the people here use huffy for real time capturing and then encode to mpeg using multipass encoders like cce.
The problem with this method is that size of huffy encoded file is huge - about 300M / min for 480x480.
I am thinking about trying a different approach:
1. capture as mpeg2 @ about 6mbps
2. encode it to normal svcd rate using multipass encoder
Anybody tried this? How good or bad the quality will be?

I think you should also try SVCD resolution : 480x480(ntsc) 480x576(pal).

[Thorn]

The more compressed the format it, the more likely you are to get a crappy output. Mostly this is because the CPU can't handle on the fly calculations fast enought to do it right. You want to capture to a fast codec (divx is not - and no current direct mpeg capture is very good at the consumer level -- you need dedicated professional hardware to do it right).

The order of preference would be Huffyuv, mjpeg and then mpeg2 (I've left a bunch out... there are many methods out there). If you can handle the huffyuv or mjpeg (at the highest quality settings you can fit on your HD) you'll see much better results. If you are stuck with capping to 300MB free you're not going to fare well... but at least you can try filtering and re-encoding.

Don't forget that the processing is important (post-processing can take many times the original cap time). Often with VHS you'll want to use time, noise, or color filters (but DON'T overdo it). This is another reason why direct-to-mpeg caps often suck -- the capper never filters and re-encodes it right, so it sits as-is.

[aykh]

I use iuVCR to capture PICVIDEO MJPEG & use Virtualdub to do DivX convertion & applying VB. filters (ie. noise reduction....). The result video look almost as good as the original.

Don't capture in MPEG2 format unless U don't want to do any format convertion or editing afterware. I had a lot of bad experience & struggling with the MPEG2 format for the last 2 months. I'd tried many difference convertion programs (except VB.) to do MPEG2-to-DivX convertion but none of them work the way it should be. (It's like I was punishing by this little devil in hell). But everything've been working flawlessly since I got MJPEG.