coverting vhs to vcd

[siraj2020]

Hi guys
greetings

I an a newbie and completely blur abt this topic, can someone guide me abt the

1. hardwares i need
2 softwares i need

to convert my vhs cassette into vcd ( any format)

thanks

[Xitanium]

well, for hardware get a capture card or vid card with TV-In, i reccomend the Cybertainment CyberMail if u can get ur hands on one (computergeeks.com sells em) a sound card w/ a line in (unless ur capture card has audio in.). software, virtualdub, the HuffYUV codec if u have ample hdd space or a MJPEG codec like Picvideo or morgan multimedia. then tsunami, cce, xing or any other encoder. and finally, VCDImager or Nero or something to burn.

[siraj2020]

how does the flow go ? how should i start,

[Xitanium]

well, assuming that youve already got card and cables, check the capture guide here.

[cyrex]

I'm having a problem installing Cybertainment CyberMail capture program. It said can't copy source file!40
I dunno if it's the prgram or what but haven't been able to get it installed on any computer.

I tried on Win2k and win98 same problem

[patrickm]

you may have a bad CD or be having a problem with your cd drive. use nero or ezcd to copy it as a data cd BUT NOT WITH THE DISC-COPY OPTION. manually drag the file structure to the layout of the new disc. this way, the burner will create a new TOC for the disc, which can help if your drive has a glitch on a certain physical location (this happened to me before).

you can prob also download the drivers from http://www.compgeeks.com under their support section.

[amgqmp]

test

[Vejita-sama]

computer geeks appears to be out of the card, anyone know any other place to get one?

[amgqmp]

Please ignore that test...it's been so long since I've posted I had to make sure my name/pass still worked.

Anyhow, I've been doing this VHS to VCD thing for the past couple weeks. I'm using an ATI TV Wonder card (with line-in through my sound card), Windows ME, Athlon 900 with fast drives and 512mb of RAM. Here's what I've learned thus far...

1 - Real-time MPEG via the ATI TV software is a piece of shi$...audio gets out of sync and it randomly started creating non-standards compliant files. I thought real-time MPEG was the only way I could record until I learned of VirtualDub. Also, stay away from ATI cards if you can. They're completely unreliable, overpriced, and they've never updated any drivers or software. They're a "hit and run" hardware vendor.

2 - VirtualDub 1.4 with the HuffYUV codec is the way to go
Capture the files to 2GB AVI's creating multiple files, then, encode to MPEG with Panasonic MPEG1, TMPGEnc, or any of the other codecs mentioned earlier by Xitanium.

Best of luck!

-AMG

[patrickm]

computergeeks still has them, but only as the package deal w/the pixera camera for $30. some dope bought out the rest of them and is selling them on ebay for $40 each now. so for less money and no waiting for auctions, you can get the card plus a free camera. while you're buying you might want to look into the aureal sq1500 sound card for $10. very good quality, digital output, 4-ch output, drivers at http://www.vortexofsound.com (much better than any SB Live product period).

the TV wonder isn't the greatest card. the drivers from ATI are generally buggy and problematic and their tech support is horrible and rude, and driver updates are very rare. however, the AiW 128 Pro does seem to be a real nice card once you get it working. the quality of AVI captures is great, and it never drops frames for me even at 29.97 720x480 res. the realtime MPEG is done in software, so it'll never be as good as a decent offline encoder like TMPG, panasonic, or what have you.

but i while i had several crashes and hangups at the beginning, but that's over with now; i never had the sound-sync problems with the aureal sq2500 sound card i use (and i'm on Athlon900, ME, asus a7v133 via kt133a chipset, 384Mb ram). plus i have the cybermail card and a yamaha 724 sound card also in there.

set your PCI latency to zero in the bios. that solves most people's sound sync issues.

compliancy is easily fixed if your files are of the right bitrate by remuxing w/TMPG, which takes only a minute or two for a half hour of video. make sure the VCD box is checked in ATI or change it in the registry. every version of MMC has the constrained paramater/VCD flag somewhere.

[Vejita-sama]

Can someone recommend another 'fairly cheap card' instead because I don't want to buy the camera.

Here's a question will ANY TV card allow you to capture?