Capturing TV Shows

[myllusion]

OK. I plan to capture 1hr tv shows such as buffy, roswell etc. I live in Australia, and at the moment only have access 2 free-to-air channels. My card runs TView2000 under win xp, and I have an Matrox G400 vid card. I want 2 produce a final product of a 200mb MPEG1 file. I would like 2 know what the best res is to capture (ill use the huffy codec as i understand it is the best), what filters to apply, and the best method of conversion once the original capture has been created. Any hints or info would b greatly appreciated. Thanks

[antisense]

Okay, if I understand you correctly, you want to produce a 200 mb file for a 1 hour show!!? You do not want to do that unless you like to look at the video in really small square. Why don't you have files of 650 mb that you can play on a dvd player? I think that you will want to produce compliant vcd mpeg files ie. 1.15 mbps, and even then that quality will not likely impress you. Just my opinion, throw that at you.

[myllusion]

Hey, thanks for your input. But actually, with out ads, buffy is only around 45mins, and I have downloaded episodes off the net that are around 170mb each, and the quality is quite good even at full screen... I was suprised to see such good quality, but its there. there are also many files to download at around 450mb, i think these are vcd compliant files, and the quality is around the same, from what i can see, as the 170mb ones... If the sound is put in mp3 format then the size of the files can be reduced whilst still keeping sound quality, i think this is partly how they achieve such good quality at only 170mb for 45mins... i'd just like 2 know exactly what ppl do to achieve such good quality at that size.

[paulw]

I am going down the same road. I have settled on XVCD. (Look on this site for a discription) However I have settled on 2Megabit encoding rather than 2.5. This gives a file around 500-600Meg. You may as well use up the disk rather than make small files unless you want to play them back only on your PC. These are designed to playback on my DVD player and they look better than some of the web downloads. I capture from VHS (satalite feed) with a Matrox RainbowRunner at 704x 576. 2 MegBytes/sec. Convert to MPEG1 with TMPGE 2.02 XVCD. Burn to disk with Nero 5.5.5.1.

Good luck

[Nelson37]

Not sure but size sounds like DivX, playback is PC-only. For TV, Noise is your enemy - do anything you can to clean/amplify signal. Component, Svideo, Composite, Cable connectors in order of quality. Capture best res you can w/no frame drops - Huffy AVI, hi-bit MPEG1 or MPEG2 (I use MPEG2 @ 10Mb/s on ATI, then re-encode w/CCE 480x480 4pass 2.4Avg mpg2, light noise filter in Vdub or AviSynth.) YOU must decide quality-speed, quality-file size, quality-compatibility trade-offs. Notice a pattern here? Do a DVD-rip to test with best-possible input, and to give you a goal to kill yourself trying to achieve. (you can get close) Lotsa trial and error on settings, use a 2nd pair of eyes, test w/multiple clips, 1-min at first, do 10-20 min before finalizing methods.
Paulw, get 800 MB CD's and fill those!