any books on video capturing?

[sepultura]

Hi. I'm looking for any books, or any online publications, that give step by step instructions for GOOD video captures. I am trying to learn the stuff about bitrates and various options in video capturing software. I have a lot of video concerts on VHS and DVD that i wanna put on my Archos 400 multimedia player. The player uses Divx, and I tried one concert so far and there are TOO many artifacts in the finished product. Other things that i downloaded from the net that are in Divx play GREAT on this unit. It's beautiful! I guess for capturing and converting in this case of the video concert, i have to have a higher bitrate, but would a bitrate calculator help me fix the problem, where the finished product looks Great, like the original?

thanks for any help you can give me!

[redwudz]

Have you been to lordsmurf's website? There's quite a bit of info on capturing there: http://www.digitalfaq.com/

Too many artifacts may be a low bitrate problem: Here's one guide for Virtual Dub that gives some idea about the Divx settings: https://www.videohelp.com/avi2divx.htm

The way I figured out bitrate VS quality VS running time is to make up a representative 5 - 10 minute clip and try different encoding settings until I had a better idea what they all do. It's mostly bitrate. You can fine tune a few other settings, but bitrate is the main one. Some light filtering sometimes helps to make the most of the bitrate you have available.

Being that this is mostly a hobby, not a lot of books out there. There are technical papers, but they get a little involved.

To make things simpler, you might try AutoGK, AVI.net or FairUse Wizard for Divx/Xvid conversions if you want decent quality without as much study.