capture advice

[atvmxr]

I am looking for a program that will allow me to capture live video, but will also allow me to stop at anytime, name clip, then go right back to capture. All within maybe 10 seconds. Any advice would be much appreciated. I am looking to capture in avi or mpeg2 formats.

[nwo]

Ulead VideoStudio or WinDV

[edDV]

I am looking for a program that will allow me to capture live video, but will also allow me to stop at anytime, name clip, then go right back to capture. All within maybe 10 seconds. Any advice would be much appreciated. I am looking to capture in avi or mpeg2 formats.

Review of basics:
Analog tuner cards either dump real time at uncompressed high bit rates or encode on the card to MPeg2 or sometimes MPeg4.

For realtime capture you have two choices. Cap many GB realtime, then edit and then slow encode for quality. Or you can attempt real time capture to MPeg. Realtime software capture sacrafices quality for real time. If you have a fast CPU, this can be the cheapest solution. ULead Video Studio will get best quality (Mainconcept Real Time Encoder) but if the CPU can't keep up it rebuffers (creates gaps in the capture). Others trash quality when they can't keep up.

Encoding capture devices are more expensive but encode DV, MPeg2, or MPeg4 in hardware for reasonable to high quality TV captures even for older paint faded PCs. Quality ranking is DV then MPeg2 then MPeg4. DV* (Canopus, ADC, DataVideo), MPeg2 (Hauppauge PVR dominates) and MPeg4 (Plextor has one) are the leaders.

Can go into more detail for any option.

* DV cap devices usually don't include tuners. Idea is to cap from TV, cable box or sat box. A MiniDv or Digital8 camcorder with "analog pass through" feature can also cap S-Video/audio to DV format in real time.

[vhelp]

Inspired by the idea (not to mention my own needs) here's what I have to say on this..

...

What you are looking for is a simple capture app that will include the feature you are basically
asking about.. easy renaming of captured source, thought it may not be available, yet. This
is something that I have been looking for myself because I do the same exact thing on a daily
bases. And, when you are in this "capture" mode, things can get a bit confusing during the
process -- sometimes I miss-label an already captured avi and or (in capture setup) I give
the wrong (usually the same filename) name to the initial filename for the capture, and con-
siquentially, I end up capturing *over* the already ( important ? ) captured file

The idea is easily do'able (in virtualdub and virtualVCR for instance) but may not be passed off
as practable enought to most developers in this area, because its not seen as an imparetive fix
or other reasonable measure for revising a tool. Anyway.

fwiw, I sketched out a capture demo of what I believe it is that you are asking. Here's a snap
shot of what can (and is) easily possible. I just throw this together in under a minute

...


* Was thrown together in pascal (borlands delphi) for demonstration purposes only.
* Also, I had to sharpen the image (in pic) because the clip was burry in that short take.
* The sample image was stripped from various capture projects I made off of this morning.

-vhelp 4665

[DB83]

Ulead Video Studio / Ulead Media Studio support auto file-naming. Once you set up the first name as, for example 'file-thisdate-0001' the next capture will be automatically named 'file-thisdate-0002' etc

Hauppauge Wintv capture takes a slightly different approach and instantly names the file "_chNum_dateofcapture_timeofcapture.fileext"

Both will support live capturing.