AIW 8500dv best capture?

[Sepen]

I have AIW Radeon 8500dv with an XP1700, 190 gb hd's and 512 ddr ram. How can I capture from cable tv with the best results? I have tried various setups with AVI, VCD and SVCD, and IMHO they all suck. Anyone that can throw me some ideas would be very helpful.

thanks,

[maxxnostra]

The trick in capturing realtime MPEG-2 files is in settings for MPEG driver it self. ATI MMC does not give you much choices for this except setting number of P and B frames (which is also limited for not giving chance to select GOP counts, closed GOP options, sequence headers etc.). Read the guide for MMC and you will get the idea that B frames are the ones that are really creating mess around. Settings of 4Px2B frames in MMC is always with closed GOP (first group has seuquence header in it), and Motion estimation search for this driver sucks. Even if you try to use less scan lines for MES it would be the same because on P frames you might hit wrong (bad) line and then B frame which uses most of the system resources (actual compressing frames) would be bad too. In other words you are wasting your resources for encoding nothing. If you use I-frames only make sure you capture at least 12Kbps recomended is maximum 15kbps. But even that is not good enough since you will need to re-encode it to IPB frames if you want to burn it on CD (compatibility Issue). My choice is defintly AVI Capture even to lower resolutions which still looks better when upscaled to higher resolution while encoding to MPEG-2, then the actual real time capture. Beleve me I've tried 6 diffrent MPEG-2 encoders. Non of them handles real time IPB capture well. What did you expect from this card??? A high quality real-time MPEG-2 IPB capture cards are in range from 800 to 10000 US$. Don't be optimistic with creating DVD-ware video with any TV tuner/Capture card, even with the best at the time (AIW 8500DV). The only way to produce neat looking DVD-like video (about 70% of the actual DVD) with your card is to capture AVI files and then encode them to DVD compiant MPEG files.
Im getting best realtime MPEG-2 with 640x480 resolution, P=3, B=2, visual masking and deinterlacing are on, MES range is 32/16 and MES quality is on 15.
Play arroung with this values and you will eventualy get what you need. :P