The Greatest DV Capture Mystery Of All Time

[dvpod]

Hope the post title grabbed your attention, because I need all the help I can get. Ok, here it goes:

When capturing DV to my laptop the highest possible
resolution I can get is 320 X 240. When I specify
to capture full DV-AVI (in any capture program) I only get the low quality 320 X 240.

Whenever I connect my DV Camcorder to the laptop through a
firewire port Windows XP automatically recognises it and
asks me if I would like to capture video using Movie
Maker. An new option is made available in My Computer.
There's an icon of a video camera which when clicked opens
the usual explorer window showing what the camera sees or
plays. This video is also only 320 X 240.

I have tried Movie Maker (1 + 2), DVIO, WinDV, Ulead Video Express and all are restricted by this 320 X 240 limit.

My DV Camera is a Panasonic NV-DS150B. I connect it via a firewire cable which fits into the socket on the laptop, a socket which was there when I bought it so I don't know much about it.

I don't understand it. Why can't I capture a higher resolution
video?

[racer-x]

You need to capture Type-2 AVI. If you use Type-1 (wich is what Movie Maker uses) Windows will only view it @ 320x240. If you use Type-2, then you'll see full 720x480. I use Adobe Premiere to capture Type-2. There are free Type-2 capture programs out there, do a search maybe there's one on this site.

[DivXExpert]

DVIO tranfers in Type-2, its free, and the best DV transfer program ever.

[tonyp12]

The DV-AVI is 720x480, trust me.

But due to that it is interlaced, most media players
will reduse the 480 to 240 to get rid of the interlaced problem
on a progressive monitor.

It also reduse the 720 to 360 to make it back to 4:3

PowerDVD does de-interlace on the fly and will display it
at "full" size.
And I think WindowsMediaPlayer9 does it to, as I no longer
have this half size DV bug anymore since I updated.
(or maybe I updated/changed the DV codec)

As you will probably re-encode it for burning, this "bug"
is just something you have to live with as most people
never store and view DV on a PC monitor for very long.

You could try this free demo codec (bottom), it only adds a watermark
when encoding.

http://www.mainconcept.com/codecs.shtml

[spectroelectro]

I am pretty sure I know the answer to your quesiton because I have gotten hammered with teh same problem.
The problem is that you are trying to use a program which requires VFW programs and all you have are WDM programs. On the video card I bought a while back, I found I could only capture to 320 x 240 because that's the only capture resoluton the Cinepak Radius codec, the only WDM codec widely available that worked with my capture card.
The solution? Download the VFX wrapper from www.doom9.org. The wrapper lets programs designed to work with VFX codecs use WDM codecs.
I worked for me, and presto, change-o, all fo sudden I was able to get 720 x 480 capture resolution (and a howle host of others).
I am pretty sure that your problem is NOT Type 1 as opposed to Type 2 AVI, since I used Ulead Medai Studio Pro for years to cpature DVD video from a camcorder in Type 1 format. Came through at 720 x 480, perfect quality, full DVD resolution, everything hunky-dory.
So I am pretty sure it's not a Type 1 / Type 2 AVi issue. It's much more likely to be a WDM vs VFW capture driver issue, and hte solution to that is the VFW wrapper from doom9.
(VFX stands for Video For Windows -- it's an older video driver protocol. After Win 2K / XP, Micro$haft switched to WDM capture protocols, which stands for Windows Digital Media. Alas, the newer OS's don't recognize or work with the older Video For Windows protocols, which leaves people using newer OS's in the lurch when they try to cpature with, say, VirtualDub or FreeVCR...unless you use the VFW wrapper.)

[turk690]

DV AVI has only two resolutions: 720x480 NTSC and 720x576 PAL. This is true of both type 1 and 2. If indeed you connected your DV camcorder successfully through firewire and was duly recognized by Windows ANY capture method/program VfW (as that with Premiere resulting in type-2) or WDM (as that with Media Studio type-1) will ALWAYS result in DV AVI clips in only one of these two resolutions. To verify this, you should have a program that has in-depth capabilities that will show the true specifications of said AVI clip (resolution, audio sampling/bitrate, audio/video codecs used to capture and needed to playback with). This can be as sophisticated as Premiere, where you can select clips on the timeline or bin and right click>properties where detailed info will be given, or as simple (and free) as AVIcodec which can be downloaded from the tools section of this venerable site dvdrhelp. Windows media player and moviemaker cannot be relied upon to tell the correct native resolution of a clip as it lies stored in your HDD; most likely it will state the current DISPLAY resolution (the default of successfully captured DV clips on a PC is 360x240 NTSC), and not much else.

[dvpod]

Thanks so much to every one who offered their great advice, I'll try everything and report back with the results. So let us hope and pray that soon The Greatest DV Capture Mystery of All Time TM will be solved...