How to convert my Lazerdisk to SVCD?

[plejoe]

Hi room,

I have a selection of karaok lazerdisk that I want to convert and burn to SVCD. My question is: is it posible to do so?
if yes, what kind of hardware and software I need?

I am a newbie from this area, any recommend is appreciated and please give me much detail as you can.

[VidGuy]

Only one way I know of to do this - get a capture card and capture it just as though it was a TV show. Since laserdiscs are an analog format, not a digital format, there is no "ripping" of a laserdisc like can be done with DVD....
Good luck.

[plejoe]

Thanks VidGuy,

I think that I go with the capture card and looking for the capture card now. what kind of card do the good job for the range of 200 to 300 buck?

beside the capture card, what else I need? anymore hardware and software require?

My PC is 1.3 GHz and have 100 GB hd and 256 Mb ram. is this good for the process.

Thanks in advance.

[VidGuy]

Personally, I use a Dazzle DVC II in an Asus 333 Athlon motherboard running Windows XP. and TWNH (a program) to do the capturing at the highest resolution (384 Kbps mp2 and 10000 Kbps mpeg2 video), then downsample it. It's biggest problem for direct capture to SVCD is that it's low on the bitrate the way it ends up working. If you search around there are people that have had good success by making their own "capture templates". As I recall, they just do a 480 x 480 encode with a 4 or 5 kbps max. This gives a 2-2.5 Kbps average, but of course, DVD players that are picky about the max will have trouble.

If you have lots of disk space, there are much cheaper cards if you don't mind resampling from a large AVI using CCE or TMPGEnc.

[jtor]

...just wanted to throw in my 2 cents.

Suggest you go with the Canopus ADVC-100, and a firewire card. That way, you've pretty much covered both digital and analog sources.

[plejoe]

Thanks all for the valueable advice.

after research thru the vcdhelp site, I came up with using digital camcoder (I need one anyway). As this site suggest, can use digital camcoder with Analog to digital pass thru to capture the video to the computer thru firewire.

My questions are:

Is this a good method regardless the cost of digital camera?

when capture using digital camcoder, what is the output file? is it .avi, .mpg?

can the output file be able to burn to svcd or dvd or I have to convert to proper format in order to burn to svcd or dvd?

Again, thanks for all of your help

[Donny661]

I've heard of people that had very good results with that method though I haven't tried it myself.

The output file should be an DV .avi because all the camera does is convert the input to DV as if it was recording anything else but instead of putting it onto your tape it sends it directly to your computer through the firewire cable.

To burn it to svcd or dvd you would have to conver the .avi

[thxkid]

Personally my 150 laser discs look great on the DVD-R's I recorded them on from my Panasonic E20 DVD recorder and very simple also, plus using the FR speed I can change what bitrate I want to use to fit the time on the laser disc. AT .86 ea. and no coasters or errors the ritek DVD-R's work out great and cheap.

[plejoe]

Thxkid,

I have a question regard to using dvd recorder to recorde your Lazerdiscs.

When you use recorder to record lazerdisc to dvd-r, the play back is sequence or you can jump from chapter by chapter?

[mcdermd]

I used a Sony DVMC-DA2 ( http://computervicestore.com/sondvmcda2dv.html ) for my LD conversions. Sent it through firewire capping to DV avi with Premiere. Cropped and filtered with VDub, IVTC'd and MPEG2 encoded with TMPGenc to get a NTSC FILM anamorphic DVD.

But that's because it was what I had and it provided results every bit as good as the original LD source.