DVD of captured tv show has poor quality.

[roblobster]

I captured a tv show with my ATI All In Wonder 9600 card in Mpeg2 format. Then burned with Pinnacle Expression. When viewed on TV the quality was quite poor. Expression indicated no compression (100%) since the show was only 20 minutes.
Will capturing in Mpeg2 yield optimized quality for DVD? The ATI software has many different capture settings. What would be recommended?

Thanks for reading.

[kyemeng]

I do not have the ATI AIW card but rather a Leadtek card and generally have found that capturing from the TV in mpeg format generally yields rather poor quality. I have tried various options and feels that the best quality lies with capturing in uncompressed avi, but then the problem is that the filesize would be overwhelming. Other options to try could be utilizing a lossless format such as Huffy, or other formats such as Xvid, Divx(which I personally have not tried before).
Since your capture period is rather short (20mins), you might want to consider uncompressed avi (This should give you the best quality). The downside to capturing in the above mentioned avi formats, besides the larger file size, is that you need to encode the file in mpeg before you are able to burn it onto a dvd. Tmpgenc Pro would be an ideal program for that.
For burning a test cd, I suggest you burn on a rewriteable.

[muskgrave]

I DO have the AIW 9000 and had a few questions for you.

What resolution are you capturing at?
Do you have the video soap turned on?
What bitrate are you capturing at as well?

Mpeg2 is a lossy compression format but if you use the right resolution and high enough bitrate you won't see much or perhaps any quality loss. I recorded a car show off tv and it looked just like the original show which is more than I can say for vhs .

SO! Be sure you are capturing @ 720x480, 48khz audio capture. NO Video Soap. And with TV you can probably use a Variable Bit Rate. I would try putting the max bitrate somewhere in the 7000 range and the min in the 3000 range...median betweeen 4-5000...then see how that looks

dlv

[roblobster]

Thanks all.
My current Mpeg2 setting had "light" video soap. I'll try it w/ none.

The custom AVI setting had numerous codec selections listed below:
UYVY video format (native)
YUY2 video format
YVU9 video format
YV12 video format
WMVideo Encoder DMO
MSScreen encoder DMO
WMVideo9 Encoder DMO
WMVideo Encoder DMO
MSScreen 9 encoder DMO
DV Video Encoder
Indeo video 5.10 Compression Filter
MJPEG Compressor
MJPEG Decompressor AL/BS
XLCompress
XLDecompress
Cinepak Codec by Radius
DivX 5.1.1 Codec
Intel Indeo Video R3.2
Indeo video 5.10
Microsoft H.261 Video Codec
Microsoft H.263 Video Codec
Microsoft RLE
Microsoft Video 1
Microsoft Windows Media Video 9
Toshiba YUV Codec

The current setting was on "DV Video Encoder" and the sound is set to "PCM (native)" resolution @ 704x480 frame rate @ 29.97 and sound @ 48Khz 16bit. But it's very sensitive to drop frames and when imported into Expression, the sound was not syncd.

Which would you use?