Capture codec

[Craig Tucker]

What is the best capture codec to use which will give the best possible quality VCD's when converted using TMPGEnc

Craig

[VingadoR]

Huffyuv codec with RGB color

[Vegita]

thats what i use huffy with 24bit RGB its so much better than pic video mjpeg on highest setting but on the up side pic video....sorry there is no up side to using pic video

[Triffid]

If you read here:

http://www.math.berkeley.edu/~benrg/huffyuv.html and
http://www.virtualdub.org/docs_capture

you will find that you may be better off using YUV format instead of RGB, together with the Huffyuv codec. It is faster to compress and the RGB data from your capture card is probably not real anyway!

One word or caution. If you use YUV and DON'T compress with Huffyuv, you may find that the colours get screwed up by the microsoft YUV codec (msyuv.dll). (See http://www.virtualdub.org/virtualdub_news_old.html, one third down the page...6/11/2001)

[incognito]

I didn't think that tmpg could read yuv encoded files-- I thought it
could only handle RGB.

[Hiei]

Huffyuv codec and Pinnacle DV codec are awesome.

[spidey]

I too use Huffyuv with RGB 32 bit. I haven't seen any problem in it's conversion, and I do think it does give beeter color and caps than the yuv. I'll gladly check out the Yuv again, but this did seem the best I'd seen.

Also, your right, that Mjpeg PicVideo, bad move.....at least that's what I've found. I know plenty people are very happy with it too though.

[Triffid]

Incognito,

When Huffyuv decompresses it can do it to either YUV or RGB. When talking to TMPGEnc it gives it RGB automatically. And that is full 24 bit RGB (not the crap you get with MSYUV.dll !!!)

Spidey,

I guess whether the colours look better using RGB depends on a couple of things (I assume you are comparing the final RGB or MPEG output and not the intermediate file):

a) Does your hardware directly capture to RGB
b) Does your hardware do a better YUV to RGB conversion than Huffyuv

If your looking at the YUV format video on your PC then it can also be a matter of how your display card/directX etc handle YUV.

Any other opinions?

[tjdmobile]

I capture to DIVx (352x480x6000kbps). I used to use Huffy, but DIVx is so much smaller, and has equal quality for my VCD's.

TJD

[t0nito]

Well in my case I'd rather use mjpeg in RGB24 because it works great with my celeron 466 MHz and the quality is quite good, TMPGEnc handles it nicely and mostly because if I use Huffy it will fill my disk up in a flash! Even though huffy's quality is better because it's lossless codec. I would prefer using huffy if it the resulting videos weren't so big in disk space.

[Craig Tucker]

I am using virtualdub to capture, I have the huffyuv codec installed, but virtual dub will only allow me to capture using my ATI codecs, although it will allow me to convert or save using huffyuv.

Anyone know why ?

I have an all in wonder 128 pro 32mb and MMC6.3

Craig

[steev]

I was trying to capture a video to convert to VCD. I used Virtualdub and huffyuv as described in the guide, but when I play it back it flickers horribly in Media Player. Is this normal? Even with my 650 Duron I was getting a lot of dropped frames. The average frame rate was only about 20 when I was trying to get 25. Frame size was 384x288 (I think).

I also had some disk space issues. The programme is about 50 minutes and it looked like it was going to excede the 4GB limit of the FAT32 partition. I know that's an issue, but I was planning to use the same partition in Linux. I may change it as it's a pain for DV work.

I tried using the Indeo 5.10 and that worked much better. No frames dropped and reasonable disc usage. A quick conversion to MPEG produced video that should be adequate for this job. It's just so a friend can send a documentary to a friend in the US to play on his DVD.

Steve

[DaMo]

I've used the Huffyuv codec under YUV2 and I recommend you use it but some users, like me, might encounter a problem where the picture flips vertically and I have to say I got no idea what causes it or how I can resolve this issue, apart from using a certain filter in VDub.

But use the Huffyuv codec anyway and see how it works for you.