Note: I am familiar with BTwincap drivers but I would preffer to keep my setup below because of simplicity.

I have Two cards in my PC; Hauppage and Pinacle PCTVPro. Now my hauppage card is a heck of a lot better than Pinnacle, but Pinnacle has one advantage - more inputs.

Also Hauppage has VFW drivers (that's why me likes it) installed while pinnacle WDM drivers.

From time to time I want to do some captures directly to VCD using given software by pinnacle (I talked to their support - not much help - mostly reinstall drivers).

I also have Studio 8 with hardware acceleration option but not much of an effect even there, although the preview windows looks cleaner.

I also have multisystem VCR so I tested this with PAL and NTSC setting (USA here, NTSC is better as realtime pal capture is Poor with VCD; (when capped with two fields then it doesn't look as much hiccuping))

Finally, my comments / questions.

There is something weird when capturing to NTSC and PAL format. Pal looks like as if I encoded it with TMPGENC right on the spot (well, close). The picture is sharp, clean and very acceptable in terms of quality for VCD.

However when switched to NTSC something weird happens. First on the preview window one can notice some resample effect that creates "stairs" looking effect on the entire picture especially noticable on red color.

Also the picture gets blurred and for me it makes it rather ugly. PAL VCD mode stays sharp though.

I have a feeling this has to do something with source size mode for the picture preview.

My guess is that when NTSC VCD is enabled (and generally such formats) the picture is "somewhere in the hardware/drivers/OS" resized from 320x240 to "your output" picture size; in this case 352x240.

(if you use AMcap and such software you can never select 352x240 and leave it there - it always goes back to 320x240 or 352 x 288). I am guessing that there is like a "root" definition for size that pinnacle (b.t.w hauppage wdm drivers for me work the same - I tried in XP) takes at 320x240 and then resamples it to 352x240.

Is this something that may be buggy in nature and has been discussed before or am I just drinking too much beer tonight?

Are there any technical explanations behind it? and is it possible to fix it?

An Update. I quickly did resample of one small portion of capture (Spike TV Sign) - I think it's obvious to spot the difference.