Best Capture Software?

[WeYe]

I have a Gainward TI 4800 with Vivo cable (S-video in), WD 80G 7200 HD, and 512 MB Ram. I am running WinXP Pro.

I want to capture from VHS via SVCR with S-Video Out.

I'm looking for quality in at most 3x the length of the video captures. EX. I want to be able to cap, edit, encode, and burn 90 minutes in 4 hours or so.

Instead of trying out tons of new cap software proggys I'd like to know what other people with similar hardware are using.

My biggest problem in the past has been working with XPs WDM drivers.

Anyone out there able to capture with similar specs to VCD or SVCD with good final results?

Any info would be greatly appreciated.

[bchball]

Well i'm a novice at this capture stuff but if you're capturing from VHS, high resolution is a waste of space on your HDD (that's what i've read here on the forums).
Heaps of people here seem to like using Virtual Dub. It captures in .avi format so you may need to use TMPGEnc or Nero to create the MPEG/VCD. Capturing in raw MPEG format is not as good for me because I have a cheap capture card Geforce2 GTS Deluxe (like an all-in-wonder card) even when I use PowerVCRII to capture.
Also my friend has great success with a TV Tuner card and encodes the .avi with Nero. He reckons it takes 3-4 hours to encode a to a 80min CD. 8)
BTW. I have XP SP1 also and use the WDM_1.08 driver with success but the WDMCapDrv1190 gave me grief by adding a white bar across my finished avi file.

[missionmasque]

I use Vdub to capture to avi and tmpgenc to encode to Mpeg.

Capture all you need, cue them all up in tmpgenc, set it running while you go to work or over night. Job done.

Capturing direct to Mpeg is horrible (for me). Large blocks even at the best settings.

[WeYe]

Can I capture to .avi with vDub and XP Pro without losing a million frames?

I've read a lot of posts about vDub and the WDM drivers. I myself used vDub on a 98se box with great success. When I tried it on XP it sukd. That was with a WinTV FM though.

[Craig Tucker]

I capture using vdub and xp pro. I have an AIW 7500 and capture my cable broadcast at 720x576 YUY2 with Huffyuv compression. I then use TMPGEnc to convert to mpeg2 for burning to DVD. During capture I probrably drop 1 frame about every 3-5 mins, I believe vdub does this to compensate for differing video and sound card clock speeds.

[Ego_Shredder]

I have been doing capture and encoding for two years now with a Hauppauge WinTV FM PCI and in that time I have tried just about every program going! I have settled upon these programs:

1) AVI_IO - for capturing cos it doesn't lose frames, Virtual Dub is great but does lose frames for me. I capture at 704 x 576 resoltion, 24bit colour, PicVideo M-JPEG Codec (quality set to eighteen), 44.1/16 audio uncompressed. I capture at this resolution for the best quality and I encode at the same resolution using KWAG's KVCD templates (KVCDx3 MPEG-2 VBR).

2) Virtual Dub - for editing .avi video captures only. It is lightening fast and easy to use. It edits quicker if you use the batch mode, rather than processing each edit seperately. I use the 'Direct Stream Copy' settings for both video and audio.

3) TMPGEnc - for encoding to MPEG1/2. I use the templates from http://www.kvcd.net to encode my .avi captures to MPEG1/2. If I have captured at 704 x 576 resolution, I use the KVCDx3 http://www.kvcd.net/KVCDx3-MPEG-2-PAL.mcf template to encode at the same resolution using MPEG-2. The quality is near DVD and FAR better than standard VideoCD. If I need to cram more video on one disc, I do a normal VideoCD or for near VCD quality and more minutes I use the http://www.kvcd.net/KVCD-LBR-352x288-_PAL_-PLUS.mcf template, which gives me between 2 and 3 hours on one disc.

4) Nero - to burn video files to VideoCD or Super VideoCD. I select 'non-compliant' SVCD when I am doing 704 x 576 resolution video, otherwise I just do standard discs for normal resolutions.


I have used many, many programs in endless combinations but this is the best for me. If you want reasonable quality with the minimum of fuss and no further encoding I would use WinVCR v2.5 which captures straight to MPEG1/2 at any resolution you want.


Ego_Shredder

[kenmo]

VirtualVCR is the best capturing app I've used. Drops little frames and keeps audio/video in perfect synch.

www.digtv.ws

And best of all it's FREE !

[henriQ]

Greetings.

I have a substantial experience (3 different rigs; 3 different video cards;
2 different TV cards) and almost all capturing applications around (including shareware ones) and and i cann't but strongly emphasize the
above Kenmo's message.

But i can advance an extra good news piece: now VirtualVCR has its
own scheduling application (thanks to MDunn & Leon Cheong).

Just try it -- you'll thank me for this suggestion.

Regards,

HN

[zappernl]

Hi Guys,

A question: I'm looking for a capturing program that has a feature similar to the video editing software which comes along with Win Xp. When you start capturing, this program splits the captured output automatically into scenes. So you can put a tape in your VCR, start capturing and whenever a new scene starts, a new AVI-file is created. I would like to have the output in an AVI output and not in the Windows Video format (I can not use that).

(I'm capturing VHS/S-VHS)

Any suggestions?

[Craig Tucker]

DVD workshop will create a new file at scene changes during capture. I know this works with DV, not sure about VHS, never tried it.