Help with captured AVI: Vdub / HCenc / RGB / YUY2 / YV12

11th May 2009 16:02 #1

Member

I have some old family VHS tapes which I'd like to put on DVD. I'm fairly new to this (so far I've managed to piece together info from these forums) but have managed to capture a file to AVI using Virtualdub to capture S-Video from my JVC VHS player via my ATI X1900XT card. The tape is 2 hours long, I got zero dropped frames and a couple of hundred inserted frames, but audio appears to be in sync so I'm reasonably happy.

The source is interlaced 4:3 PAL (PAL I) and I captured to 720 x 576. I used HuffYUV in RGB mode. I want to keep everything interlaced as my intention is to encode to DVD-compliant MPEG-2 and burn to DVD for watching on TV.

But now I'm stuck ... :

Some of the captures may need some Vdub filters running on them (some more than others), colormill, some denoise etc. But others should be OK without. I've heard good things about HCenc and, given that it's free, I'd like to frameserve out of Vdub to HCenc. However, if I do this (by renaming the frameserved file as X.avs) I get an error (something to do with the script needing to start with a hexadecimal). I also get framerate mismatch errors in HCenc Gui when I click "make DVD compliant". I figure this might be something to do with the fact that Vdub is frameserving RGB and not YV12?

Could someone please talk me through the best way to go about doing this? I'd prefer not to have to learn Avisynth unless there's no other acceptable way to get a sensible workflow going.

Also, am I right in thinking that if I run a Vdub filter when frameserving, Vdub will always be "outputting" RGB? So I could never therefore input this into HCenc?

Is it bad to go from RGB to YV12? What about RGB to YUY2? Is there an optimal solution that a relative newbie like me can get to grips with?

Thanks in advance!

EDIT: I found this guide which seems to be similar to my aim. http://dvdguide.ennik.com/ But ... will doing a conversion to YV12 cause a loss in quality meaning I'm better off using tmpgenc or something which accepts RGB24 input?