TV Show Capturing

[DTWells2k2]

I am wanting to capture some shows with my card (AIW 7500) with the general standard mpeg settings but whenever I just use VCD its always rather bad quality (somewhat pixelated). If someone else ever downloads TV episodes by the group FTV (Friends and just about every other tv show that is released) they have really good quality while still only having the standard 10 megs for every minute, give or take a few megs, generally 230-240 for 22 minute show, give or take a minute or 2. How can I get better capturing? Also the audio is kinda soft too.

[Fomalhaut]

I have the same card and I agree that the quality is bad compared to FTV. It looks like many of the high quality FTV videos were not made from TV but some official tapes. So I tried to capture videos from some high quality official tapes I have, but the quality is still not as good as those FTV videos. I wonder how those FTV people produce their videos. I use video composite as input. I heard that S-video will give a better quality, but my VCR doesn't have an S-video output. What I am wondering is if AIW 7500 is able to produce the FTV quality video. Should I try other capture cards? Does anyone know what capture card/hardware the FTV people use?

[Greg12]

They probally capture AVI and then offline encode.

What you are doing is a real time MPEG capture, which will never be as good as if you capture AVI and then transcode to mpeg.


You could look into a hardwar encoder, which has a special chip that does the encoding, some ppl say they r as good as VCD.

If you want real quality, capture AVI.

[LordKariya]

Use S-Video Cables
Capture to HuffyUV (codec)
then either:
use divx 2-pass @ 1200
filters: Smart Smoother Hi-Qual (Default Settings)
Smart Resize to 512 384

or for vcd/svcd

Tmpgenc
Advanced : IVTC (Auto-encode, might make some errors, ya never know) , Noise Reduction 100/4/100, High quality mode (this will take a LONG TIME)

[leffe]

I think people in those groups caps from Digital tv or sattelite dish.
So the signal is digital.
Then if u capture as .avi and encode in tmpgenc to vcd go into options and select 2pass and then also those that tmpgenc shall encode in slowest speed = best quality.

[hwoodwar]

DTWells2k2:

I too have the ATI AIW 7500. I have been experimenting with the various VCD formats, now for about a year. What works best for me (for TV shows or anything coming across cable TV) is to

1. Capture at 352 x 480 using VirtualDub and the HuffyUV codec to AVI format.

2. Encode to CVD format using TMPGenc

3. Use Kwag's SKVCD NTSCfilm template

4. Modify the template to
a.) Framerate 29.97 fps
b.) Rate Mode Control 2-Pass VBR , min 1000, max 3500-4000, and avg to fill the disk (about 2200 for 45min)
c.) Motion Search Precision to High Quality

5. Burn using VCDEasy in SVCD mode, turning off compliance checks.

The encoding process on my system (2.4Gig Pentium 4, 512meg ram) takes 2-3 hours for a 1-hour show (generally 45min after I cut out the commercials.) Looking at your system specs I would expect 4-6 hours.

If I have a "good" signal coming across the cable, It looks to me like my final product (CVD) is within five percent of the original quality coming across the cable. My cable TV company provides a "standard" analog signal. It is not digital.