MPEG2 Capturing : ATI 7500 or PVR-250

[jfebus]

Hi All,

I have gave up trying to get a Vitec DCM capture correctly (without artifacts) and I am plaining to buy another card.

Which one do you recommend? The ATI 7500 or PVR-250? I will be capturing VHS tapes and then burning them to DVD.

Regards,

[jarroyo]

Jose,

I just got done playing with the AVI AIW 8500DV with good capture success using IuVCR and PowerVCR. VirtualDub dropped a lot of frames. I am having problems with the video part of the card mostly because it is interfering with my sons OLD games. All new games work great. I also was growing old with TMPEnc encoding taking too long, so was about to settle with using the MainConcept encoder. At $150, it seemed to me that I should try the hardware encoding route.

So, I bit the bullet and bought the VPR-250 Hauppauge last night. I am going to give it a run this weekend and see if I am happy with it. I will let you know what happens. If PVR does not do it for me, I will probably either go with back with the AVI and deal with my children's wrath or go with the Canopus AVDC-50 card.

[jfebus]

Hi jarroyo,

Why you are using tmpgenc? I thought that the ATI 7500 was able to capture in MPEG2 directly. Can you please tell me about your experience after you play arounf with the pvr-250?

Regards,

[mreed80]

I have been working with the PVR-250 for the last few weeks. The captures are excellent in MPEG-2. there seems to be some bad frames happening now and then, which does suck.

I did try pulling in an old Star Wars VHS and it appeared to work pretty well considering my VCR is really old as I basically never use it.

So far I have had some ups and downs getting used to it, but the end product turns out well, and that is the bottom line. You probably will have to play around with it for a while to get things how you like, but I suppose that is the case with all products.

[jfebus]

Hi mreed80,

Were you able to get rid of the dropped frames?

Regards,

[jarroyo]

Jose,

There is MPEG-2 capture in the ATI cards. In my house, quality control is defined by she who must be obeyed (SWMBO) and she has puked all over any software based real time MPEG capture. Frankly, I puked over it as well because it was not good enough (blocky, motion was aweful, etc). AVI/Huffy/Mainconcept or TMPEnc was the combination that we have found acceptable. We are transfering 8mm family videos and perfect quality is what SWMBO is expecting for our memories.

BTW, I only have about a $250 budget for this hobbie.

[mreed80]

Yes, but I'm still searching for a more efficient way.

I am catching up with a few of the MPEG2s I've created, but I have been making them with the bitrate lower so that an hour long TV show ends up being around 1.5 GB, which then I will remove the commercials from and that will fit 3 episodes nicely onto a DVD.
I haven't tried it yet in this method, only the episodes I created with the higher bitrate where the file ends up to be about 3GB.

The only way I have been able to find it is by when I convert it down in TMPGE and it crashes at a spot, note where it crashes and if you move your position in source range on the TMPGE set up to cut out section, it will crash there as well, so you just have to cut them out.

The odd thing is that both times this has happened, it was right when the show was fading out to go into or coming back from commercial.

[jfebus]

Hi mreed80,

I am really concern about the quality, due to the fact that I will be converting several 100s of vhs to DVD. I am willing to capture at bitrate of 8000 if necesary just to get a perfect, and I really mean perfect capture with no drop or artifacts. Can I do that with the card?

Regards,

[mreed80]

Well, I can't say my experience was something you should base a decision to spend $100+ dollars on this as far as VCR stuff goes.

I didn't notice any dropped frames, but you can't use Virtual Dub and I just capture using the PVR-250 functionality, so I don't know how to see if it is dropping frames or not.

I would say that you most likely will be satisfied, but I just don't know about the VCR aspect enough to fully endorse it based on lack of knowledge.

[jfebus]

Hi All,

After spending 2 hours reading at the shspvr.com forum I think that the pvr-250 will not live up to my expectations!

I think I will only get really great results by capturing using my dv camera as a passtrough to Premiere 6.5 and then encoing to MainConcept.

What do you think?

Regards,

Jose

[jarroyo]

Jose,

Humm. You did not say that you had a DV camera. That would be definitely something I would consider if I had it. The Adobe Premier 6.5 comes with the mainconcept encoder which I was very pleased with. The only other thing I can mention is that I had a really hard time getting sound and movie to stay in sync. I believe most of my problems were associated with dropped frames. This should not be a problem with DV going through firewire.

BTW, I have been playing with the PVR-250 in the last hour. The software is not the most intuitive, but if the quality of capture is there I could probably live with it. I bought the card locally so I can return it if it does not perform. I have nothing to lose other than time

[jfebus]

HI jarroyo,

Those are the exact steps I am using: premiere 6.5 to capture and then export to MainConcept. But I have to wait arounf 2.5x realtime, and though about getting a mpeg capture card to speed up the process.

What I am afraid of the PVR-250 is those dropped frames that will create blocks and artifacts in the final video.

Regards,

[geniv]

I got the PVR 250 for awhile.

and to tell ya the truth that is one of the best mpeg2 quality wise capture I tried. (others I tried is, Dazzle II, PV256,Sigma Design's Real Magic DVR)

for it's $130 price it's pretty good.

I would go with the PVR250 cause realtime software mpeg2 encoding look like crap.

capture to AVI then tmpgenc to DVD is not good for me:
- takes up too much disc space initially
- problems with drop frames and possibily a/v sync off
- extra work tmpgenc to DVD


I converted some VHS to DVD and can tell you it's capable of good results.
the thing is that the captured video is good quality but it's not that compatiable with editing software (from what I hear)

I get sync effors with DVD COMPLETE, but with the Unlead movie FActory SE sync is perfect (though it's not much feature)

If you don't plan on editing or cutting anything out but just record and burn to DVD you will get good result.

most tape I would record. record at 702x480 8meg bitrate and then use Tmpgenc to reduce it to 352x240 at 1.5meg bitrate and the quality is really good. (MUCH higher quality than captured natively in 352x240 resolution. ) and I can fit about 4+ hours on a single DVDR

[SHS]

I haven't done this jfebus but I know a few people that have, there using two 2 system one with Canopus ADVC-100 to rec VCR tape in DV edit edit, etc, etc then there using the ADVC-100 to output video to a 2 system to rec rigth MPEG with PVR 250.
As we know VCR can be a pain a@@ cap if there bad spot on tape this also the same with min TV broadcast that are old tape that play so min time it an't funny hehe or TV signel is junk to being with even know it my look good on a reg TV it not the same.
Another way is to dubb the video to a new HQ tape and use a TBC (Time Base Corrected).

[yg1968]

Since you have a digital camcorder with a passthrough feature, I would use that to capture and edit. You can export the edited DV back to your camcorder.

Capturing in mpeg is faster but it will give you other problems and the quality will suffer.

[mreed80]

Just an update on getting bad frames. I have my computer in a room that I needed to run a split off cable wire to get to it. I just got a new wall jack for the cable in that room and ran a direct wire from the wall. No bad frames since then. Go figure! Hopefully that solves that problem, so my rating for this in up to probably around a 9/10

[Bizuser]

Hey, Geniv:

most tape I would record. record at 702x480 8meg bitrate and then use Tmpgenc to reduce it to 352x240 at 1.5meg bitrate and the quality is really good.

So you record direct to MPEG2 at a high resolution, then reduce in TMPG. This gives good quality? I'm surprised, since you are re-encoding an MPEG2 source, which is supposed to be bad practice.

I've done AVI captures at 480x480, then reduced in TMPG to 352x240 and the results are very good - BETTER than a native MPEG2 capture with PVR-250 at 480x480 (SVCD).

So if you are saying you get good results capturing in mpeg2, and reducing that mpeg2 stream without a loss of quality, I'll give it a shot!

To others: I have some old VHS tapes I'm trying to convert. Their quality is not great. Both the PVR-250 and the ATI AIW 128 seem to have problems with their auto settings - the image will 'glow' (get very bright/high contrast) on some low-contrast scenes. If I manually set brightness/contrast, this can be improved, but I was very disappointed with how both capture cards performed. The original image (from VCR) is fine played on the VCR to regular TV.

[geniv]

what I meant is I tmpgenc down to 320x240 just to get extra video time to fit on the DVD-R

with regular hires 702x480 mpeg2 capture I can fit only about 1-2 hours of video on a DVD-R

so I tmpegnc it down to lower bitrate 320x240 and 128kb audio. to fit over 4 hours on a DVD-R. I do notice that I get noticablily better quality then just capturing at 320x240 and lowering the bitrate.

[jfebus]

Hi all,

What about using the pvr250 to capture at 352 x 480 using a 6000 bitrate?

Regards