VHS capture for SVCD on AIW 7500?

[Bud15]

First post after several helpful days perusing this site. This site is a goldmine for a newbie! Still trying to figure out how to get good quality SVCD MPEG2 captures from VHS tape using ATI MMC 7.7. I tried the MMC Digital VCR 'Custom' SVCD option but the captured video is pretty blocky. I've tried adjusting the various custom parameters with less success. I'm using Ulead Movie Factory to Author the clips with no problem but I'm just not happy with the blocky video after capture.

I'm wondering if anyone has any adjustment suggestions to improve the quality while keeping the file SVCD MPEG2 compliant. Any help anyone can offer would be great!

My system is:
Win XP
P4 1.5
256MB SDRAM
60GB hard drive (DMA enabled)
ATI AIW 7500
MMC 7.7.0.1 (upgraded with latest drivers 2 days ago)

Thanks again!

[egg]

i'm a noob too... but here's some thoughts:

- what codec are you using in the capture?
- what resolutions are you trying?
- have you tried using virtualdub?
- take a look at my current thread (near the top of this page at the moment).

for example.. I was able, with a machine slower than yours... to capture at VCD quality, with the huffyuy codec at best.. and the quality was ok.

I had/have problems when going over that resolution though. I also have the same card as you....

Blocky pictures was never a problem.... more slow and jerky.... with some strange computerized-low-resoution-blurryness..... hard to describe...

[jeremymiller]

I have the same card and primarily do svcds as well. For best quality, for movies/home video/tv broadcast with many action/moving scenes, I capture to AVI first with V-Dubw with Huffyuv codec. Then I use CCE to encode to VBR SVCD, to be played on my Apex 1200.

For stuff without a lot movement/action, I just use MCC7.7 to capture svcd real time. I modify the svcd template in the MMC a little. For about 60M of video, I use 1.49m/s bitrate and motion search at 97. I also uncheck the deinterlacing. When done, I demux the mpg2 file with TMPGEnc and then Multiplex with BBMpeg. It plays fine on my Apex 1200, and amazingly the quality looks quite good. The best part of this method is that it saves all the time encoding the video.

Of course, everybody sees quality differently, but I am pretty happy with what I get out of the captures.

[oldfart13]

Since I can't use VDub under Win 98SE in my system (the wrapper doesn't work) I can only cap with programs that allow capture drivers to be selected (Video Capturix, Video Studio, MMC). I cap in a high quality Mpeg-2 mode (7 - 9 MB/s 480*480 224 kbit stereo) and render down to final SVCD specs using TMPGEnc. This produces much less loss than if I cap directly into SVCD. Also, use CBR so the files can be edited with programs like MyFlix XE. Using VBR usually guarantees out-of-sync audio/video files. I'd use Vdub for the filters but have not figured out frameserving for it since it's way more complicated than using programs like DVD2AVI to frameserve to TMPGEnc. I use a custom CQ template for final renders that looks great, even on VHS caps.

PS I've heard that using Win XP with the new Radeon cards will disable them if you update XP using Service Pack 1. Lots of horror stories on the ati groups on usenet...

[Bud15]

Thanks for the suggestions! I finally figured out what i was doing wrong. Like I said, I'm new to this so don't laugh! I was getting the video and audio captures via the coax TV input. I finally found the menu to switch to the composite input and the quality improved dramatically.

Only problem now is that AVI clips converted to SVCD format via Ulead Movie Factory Video Tools aren't being recongized by the same program when I go to create an SVCD! No idea why....

Anyway, thanks to those that offered suggestions.