How do I lighten up mpg file?

[ShadowSworn]

Ok, this might be a stupid question, but here goes.

When I capture on one certain channel on my DSS system, the "previously on [show title here]" looks fine, but the actual show itself is so dark that you can barely watch it. When it goes to commercial, it is fine and on the TV (live signal) it looks fine. Only happens on one channel that I know of (a local channel).

So I have two questions.

1) What would cause this to happen? Macrovision encoding maybe?

2) What is the best program to fix this? Is there some type of filter I can use to lighten up the mpeg?

Here is my equipment setup...

DSS (DirectTV) system with Tivo
All in Wonder Radeon (using s-video and RCA for sound)
Duron 800 pc with separate capping drive
Win98SE
Nero CDR Software (5.xx)

I use the All in Wonders built in VCR function to capture to mpeg1 and then I don't have to convert. Just drop in Nero and done. Looks great for all the other shows.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

Shadow

[SaSi]

I would have posted this question in the capture forum. Could get a better response. But anyway.

The best thing to do is correct brightness and color saturation while capturing. It's free and it doesn't require any additional steps.

I would bet you are using WDM drivers for capture. They certainly have a properties or adjustments tab where you can fix brightness.

If you need to correct brightness after the capture, I would suggest either Tmpgenc (has a brightness filter) or VirtualDUB (also has a brightness filter). It can read MPEG, but CANNOT write to MPEG, so you will have to encode later.

Now, a few comments/suggestions. Why would you want to capture to MPEG-1? This is the worst capture scenario. I know several capture cards or VGA cards with TV-IN come with software that does capture, but this is usually hopeless.

I have had an ASUS 3800 (TNT2) and now have an ASUS 9180 (GeForce4) with TV-IN. After trying several capture/editing programs, I realized the best bet is to use VirtualDUB's capture capability. It will be tricky at first (VCDHelp guides can help you there as well as browsing through the Capture forum).

I would suggest using DivX 5.02 at 1-pass quality based with Q = 2 (max), or huffyuv codecs. DivX is a bit faster than huffyuv but hufgyuv is lossless. DivX will generate much-much smaller files (1.8~2.3Gb per hour for full frame). My suggestion for the codec is DivX unless you have a reason to go to another.

You can then encode to either MPEG-1 (if you need VCD), or MPEG-2 (for SVCD or DVD) using Tmpgenc or MainConcept.

Capturing with VDUB gives you the flexibility to do filtering either on-the-fly (if your CPU has the mussle) or later, while you are editing out commercials etc.

[TheNob]

I agree with SaSi. If you can avoid capturing to MPEG, do it. I played around extensivly with capturing directly to Mpeg-1 and it just doesn't happen. At least, not well.

My best resluts are :
* Capture to 720x480 using Vdub and Huffyuv compression.
* Apply any filters after capture.
* Edit with Premiere.
* Encode to VCD/SVCD with TMpeg.

It doesn't take THAT much of a machine either. I have a AMD1.2g with 512RAM. Capturing at that size can take up some drive space though.