Which codec for capture?

[Karina]

Basically what I use my capture card for is capturing various VHS and DVD movies from my personal collection so I can view them on my pc or laptop in my bedroom or while travelling without needing to drag my vcr and dvd player into here all the time.

So far what I've been doin is hooking up either the dvd player or vcr to the capture card and then using the Winfast PVR software which came with my card (or Powervcr) to capture to MPEG1 which I've then been converting to DivX or Xvid via either DrDivx or Virtualdub.

After doing much reading through here and other sites, I get the impression that capturing to mpeg1 is not the greatest idea and I would likely get better results from another codec.

I have one problem though, I don't have a lot of space to work within, only 10gig, mpeg1@4000kbps seems to fit in this working space pretty well.

Is there a better option which wont require much more than 4.5gig an hour and doesn't need a superfast system?

[Vejita-sama]

First, there is no need to capture your DVDs. Look to the left under DVD Rip for guides on how to rip the DVD to your HD. What I normally do use DVD Decrypter to rip the DVD as an ISO image. I can store several image files of different DVDs on my HD. Then if I want to work with/watch one I mount the image with Daemon Tools. This creates a new virtual drive letter that acts just like you inserted the original disc into your DVD-ROM drive. As you said nice for trips.

Now since it appears that your main goal is archive your VHS captures to watch on the PC (ie. you don't want to convert them to x(S)VCDs or DVDs) I would recommend capturing them and then converting them in DivX or xvid files. These are MPEG4 compression codecs (that ONLY work on the PC). The files are much smaller but the quaility is pretty good.

There are guides to the left on making Divx files (author) but there are more guides at http://www.doom9.org as this site focuses more on x(S)VCD/DVDR.

[Karina]

Unfortunately I can't rip dvd's as I don't have a dvd drive in my system.

Anyway basically what I want to know is, for my situation, is there a better solution than mpeg1 for the capturing part of the procedure, before I convert to divx or xvid?

At the moment I capture to mpeg1@4000kbps, convert to an mpeg4 format and then burn to a cd which I can put in my cd wallet and take with me travelling.

[willy_annand]

Unfortunately I can't rip dvd's as I don't have a dvd drive in my system.

Anyway basically what I want to know is, for my situation, is there a better solution than mpeg1 for the capturing part of the procedure, before I convert to divx or xvid?

At the moment I capture to mpeg1@4000kbps, convert to an mpeg4 format and then burn to a cd which I can put in my cd wallet and take with me travelling.

Capturing to MPEG1 will cause you to lose alot of quality.
I capture my VHS tapes to AVI and use the Huffy compression method, the Huffy codec is Lossless, so you get the same quality as the source. It takes about 6-7GB per hour though so you need a large HD.

[Karina]

Thankyou Willy.

I suspected mpeg was quite lossy and had also heard that it is a bad choice if you intend to do any editing.

6-7gig an hour is pushing my limits a little but I could possibly deal with it after a little resizing of my partitions.

What about the mjpeg codecs, how do these compare to huffy with regard to size of the video and the quality?

[Donny661]

huffyuv would be better than mjpeg if you had the space because you won't get compression artifacts. mjpeg is lossy compression and huffyuv is lossless compression. In your case I would suggest using mjpeg because your hard drive is so small for capturing, and the compression artifacts from mjpeg will be less than what you are using now (mpeg-1).

[willy_annand]

6-7gig an hour is pushing my limits a little but I could possibly deal with it after a little resizing of my partitions.

Have a look at AVI_IO, one of it's features is to span several hard drives or partitions.

[Karina]

Thanks guys, I'm pretty pushed for space, having win2k, linux and 15gig worth of mp3's on my little 40gig drive. Whatever space I can find I'll move to the partition I have set aside for video capture.

Its a shame I can't afford another drive at this point in time but that will be an option in the future and something I'm seriously going to need to consider.

Thankyou again for the help, it is greatly appreciated.

Kari.

[Heavensent]

picvideo mjpg codec is grate.
you can capture full movie at about 8.5 gb
(if you use qulity of 18 out of 20)

it will look much better than a powervcr capture of mpeg1 at 4000.
and you can convert it to vcd after you capture and take it with you

i think you will be pleased.

[MrKGB]

Karina,

i have the same capture card as you.
With winfast pvr one can capture directly into divx, just select the divx codec in capture profile!
the only problem is that this codec is cpu intensive, so you may not be able to capture at high resolutions.
you should try the following:
open task manager -> performance tab, start recording and check CPU usage, if it is 100%, you should reduce your resolution or maybe try to change some divx settings.
my 2GHz Athlon is able to encode divx @ 90% cpu and @ 640x480, so your cpu should be able to handle 352x240.

what you can also do is to reencode your 4000 kbps mpeg1 into VCD compliant mpeg1 (1150 kbps) using tmpgenc (free for mpeg1 encoding), so you will be able to burn your file on VCD. there will be almost no quality loss after this. actually 4000 kbps mpeg1 is not bad for low resolutions, so probably this option is better.

[Digitizer]

6-7 Gigs per hour with Huffy? Not on my planet

It depends on the resolution. I noticed that if I capture at less than DVD specs, the colors look washed out in the output, plus the image quality is not crisp. It would be difficult to have enough space to capture THAT with Huffy. The hardware will not last long either at those rates

I mostly use MJPEG at 19 quaility settings for most everthing. It's a great tradeoff between quality and size. For smaller projects, I'd say Huffy.

I am not aware of any other practical codecs.

[Karina]

I think I'll play around with the picvideo mjpeg codec.

What about the audio? using pcm obviously will eat a lot of space, I think mp3 might be a bit too taxing on my cpu.

Any suggestions?

[Karina]

Oh by the way the resolution I'm typically capturing at is 352x240 (PAL 25fps)

[willy_annand]

6-7 Gigs per hour with Huffy? Not on my planet

It depends on the resolution. I noticed that if I capture at less than DVD specs, the colors look washed out in the output, plus the image quality is not crisp. It would be difficult to have enough space to capture THAT with Huffy. The hardware will not last long either at those rates

I mostly use MJPEG at 19 quaility settings for most everthing. It's a great tradeoff between quality and size. For smaller projects, I'd say Huffy.

I am not aware of any other practical codecs.

Never a good trade when quality is effected.
I want my final product to be as clear as the input product.
I tried MJPEG and at any "quality setting" it was still a step down from what I get with Huffy. I guess some people are happy with second best, not me.

[g_shocker182]

dvd-roms are pretty cheap now-a-days.. consider buying one


http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/productdetail.aspx?sku=A0084188&cs=19&c=us&l=en?ord...AFD&DGVCode=SS

that one is $31 and u can buy it off dell.com (reputable site)

[Cecilio]

Oh by the way the resolution I'm typically capturing at is 352x240 (PAL 25fps)

hey Karina you got that wrong 352*240 is not pal you should do this 352*288 25 fps (PAL)

[Karina]

hey Karina you got that wrong 352*240 is not pal you should do this 352*288 25 fps

Yeah I realize that, for some reason 352x288 throws the aspect ratio out a bit with captures from my dvd player (unless I switch mode to letterbox 4x3).

:

dvd-roms are pretty cheap now-a-days.. consider buying one

I would but I run an micro system, only one 5.25" drive bay.... so I'd have to take out the cd-r to fit in a dvd rom.

I'll likely get a dvd-rom/cdrw combo drive in the future.... or maybe a dvd burner.

[Karina]

Well I tried Picvideo mjpeg at 19 quality setting and used iuVCR which despite looking a little rough around the edges appears to be an excellent program.

Capture came out pretty good no dropped frames for a 90min movie encoded audio to a mp3 160kbps audio stream in realtime, so worked out pretty good, but Virtual Dub refused to work with the avi file saying it had a large number (like about 90% of the frames) which it couldn't decode. The avi file plays fine, holds sync and seems to be an excellent capture.

Any ideas?

[feenix]

It could be because the audio is compressed (mp3).

Try again with uncompressed audio and see if this makes a difference. Unfortunately I can't try it as I am unable to capture compressed audio.

[RoopeT]

6-7 Gigs per hour with Huffy?

I would say 30-40 Gb / hour (Huffuv full PAL)

[willy_annand]

6-7 Gigs per hour with Huffy?

I would say 30-40 Gb / hour (Huffuv full PAL)

Just tried a test with a 99 minute video. NTSC-SVCD format, don't have any full DVD clips on my HD at the moment.

VirtualDub stated the result would be 33GB. At that rate, 1 hour would be 20GB. I don't know where I got the 6-7GB figure, I apologize....

[Karina]

I've just tried with the huffyuv codec.... again same problem... virtual dub wont process it (though it plays fine in virtual dub (I've been using mp3 again for audio), figured it would be ok as virtual dub can do direct stream copy for the audio.

Huffy came out excellent by the way, so I think this is what I'll use if I can sort out the conversion to xvid.

It's really frustrating because I want to capture audio straight to mp3 and then just copy the audio data straight across to the converted file via direct stream copy in virtualdub without the need to reencode again. This would save me both disk space at capture time and encode time for the xvid as the encoding of the audio stream to mp3 is already done.

Any other programs which will handle a huffyuv/mp3 avi for 2 pass conversion to xvid?

[Karina]

Half res' DVD captured with Huffyuv (YUY2) with mp3 audio stream seems to fit that 6-7gig an hour ballpark.

Half res' is what I'm capturing at anyway.

Seems to work well....... now if I could just convert it to xvid

[feenix]

I'm a little bit lost as how much disc space you think you'll save by just compessing the audio?

If you are using huffy then your file size will be big anyway. Even uncompressed the audio stream only takes up a small percentage of the overall file size.

[Karina]

I'm pushing the limits of my space with the audio compressed, every byte counts in this case and the audio encodes fine in realtime, so I didn't see why it would be a problem.

[feenix]

Fair enough.

I don't know if you've tried it but a more radical approach would be to capture in Xvid real time! If you have the processing power and set the optimum frame size then it is possible (but only with uncompressed audio!)

[Karina]

Yes I have thought about that approach also, but I would like to maintain visual quality as best as possible for the finished item... I figure direct capture to xvid would likely give slightly worse picture quality than my original approach of capture to 4000kbps mpeg1 then convert via 2pass xvid.

I believe I have virtual dub working now using the avi's with mp3 audio.... its not complaining and currently processing quite happily, so I'll see what happens.

[Karina]

Small update which some people might find interesting... Virtualdub eventually errored and refused to continue encoding the file.

I tried again with the Virtualdubmod version, no complaints from the software and the result was beautiful, the best mpeg4 file I've ever done.

[willy_annand]

I tried again with the Virtualdubmod version, no complaints from the software and the result was beautiful, the best mpeg4 file I've ever done.

Excellent, congratulations Karina.
It is always nice to know the Forum helps people acheive what they want.