Keep quality capturing with ATI TV Wonder VE

[fhyamaia]

Hey All,

I'm fairly new to this place (VCDHelp), but it is amazing how much info I could already get here.

I recently bought an ATI TV Wonder VE, and I've been able to capture my VHS tapes without problems, other than the pixeled images.

I tried the direct capture to their VCD format, and everything was fine, except the pixeled image. I mean, the sounds was in sync, and other than the pixeled image, I couldn't tell the difference.

Is there a way to keep the same VHS quality? I know I can't make it better, but just getting rid of the pixeled image would be nice enough.

Thanks in advance,
Fabio

[menace]

Another ATI initiate..

What i do is record at 2.77mb/s using VBR or 1.96mb/s using CBR (variable and constant bit rate respectively). This fits 45 mins on one CD nicely, with pretty good quality (at least VHS) Unfortunately to get more on you have to reduce your bit rate accordingly. To get a standard VCD with compliant settings to look good--is alot of work IMHO so your best bet is to go xVCD and juice up the settings to the point where your DVD player won't take it -hence the 2.77mb/s. Its alot of playing with settings but it is possible and depends on how much time and effort you're willing to dedicate to it :P

[fhyamaia]

Thanks Menace!

I'll try those settings tonight. I assume that playing with capture resolution won't do much, right? But still, I can't get the second number (vertical lines?) to go above 240, so I guess I'm stuck with that. :-)

And I also assume that I should bump up the motion capture thing (or whathever you call that thing) to 99%, right? :-)

Anyway, thanks for the reply!

Fabio

[menace]

Oh yeah the resolution helps--to a point--as you increase resolution you should increase bit rate or quality ends up being worse. I use 720x480 and deinterlace (combines two images into one--sort of) Also crank up motion estimate as far as you can!

[quickfamily]

Hi,

I'm new to the capturing process but I have had a similar experience with the ATI TV wonder VE card. Like you I tried capturing in VCD format and found the quality unacceptable with large color blocks. I then tried capturing using the 'Good Quality' setting in MMC 7.1. This gave me an MPEG-2 file on the PC which when played back using either the MMC software or Windows Media Player gave an acceptable quality. The only problem I had was that I dropped some frames during the capture so I reduced the capture rate from 6.0Mbits/sec to 5.0Mbits/sec. This solved the dropped frames and the quality of the MPEG-2 file was still acceptable.

I then used the TMPGenc encoder to convert to VCD MPEG-1 format. Even with all the best quality settings selected in the TMPGenc interface the resulting VCD compliant file was still not an acceptable quality for me. I switched to using TMPGenc to make SVCD and this works for me.

So here's what I do

1) Use a custom cature setting on MMC 7.1 of
640X288 (I'm a PAL user)
5.0Mbit/sec
MPEG-2 VBR

2) Convert to SVCD using TMPGenc
3) Add titles, effects, music etc using Ulead Video Studio 6
4) Burn to SVCD using Ulead Video Studio 6

A couple of things I've run into as problems along the way

- My audio sync suddenly stopped working during the capture process. I reloaded all the ATI drivers and the MMC 7.1 software and it fixed the problem. Since then I have read a thread that explains how the default MPEG codec can mess up the audio sync. I had loaded Ulead Video Studio 6 and a trial version of Sonic Video Factory and I think that maybe one of these had overwritten the original ATI codec.

- I cannot capture above 288 lines of horizontal resolution (240 for NTSC). I think that this is because it is the VE (value edition) of the card and so the software locks you out from going to higher resolutions. I have read that MMC 7.5 solves this if you can actually find it anywhere to download it and you want to download 43 Meg of data. I also read that generic bt8x8 drivers from sourceforge.net would solve it but I downloaded these and I couldn't get them to work at all. It would be nice if I could get above 288 as it would be great to capture directly to SVCD format and knock out the TMPGenc step in the process.

Hope this helps

Andy

[fhyamaia]

Hey Andy,

Thanks for your reply.

Last night, I was playing with the settings that menace suggested. So I created a custom profile to capture at CBR 1.96Mb/s and 99% motion estimate. The result was better than the default VCD settings, but I'm hoping to get a better result.

Like you, I also tried bumping up everything (640x240, CBR 6Mb/s, 100% motion estimate), capture an MPEG-2 file, then run it through TMPGEnc. The image itself was much better, but there a lot of video hickups during the playback of the resulting VCD (audio was fine though).

I also tried the free source bt8x8 drivers, and could not get them to work. I was able to find MMC 7.5 on ATI site, but the description states that it is only for Windows XP, 2000 and ME (I'm still using 98).

Anyway, I'll keep playing with it some more. It's keeping me busy at nights (not that my son doesn't, but...). :)

Thank you all very much for your suggestions and comments.

Fabio

[lucindrea]

i also have a TV-WONDER capture card ( not the all in one, just the capture card ) and i have been able to mess with the setings given here
http://www.pcphotovideo.com/7.htm
to get some decent quality captures ... their is a catch ... IF you change the rez useing the reg hack , it will capture at that rez BUT their are 2 things to concider .... 1 you cannot watch while capturing as the card will not display a rez that is not one of the defaults ... and 2 if you even open the settings panel it will immeditly delete the hacked profile and switch to the default capture .... a bit of a pain if you ask me ... it seems to me that ATI figures that even though the capture chipset is the same on the capture card as on the all in one card the software will not let you do custom rez ( i.e. 480X480 ) , but if you have the all in one card that option is their. Cant blame them for making the all in one look like a better card.

Of coure if your stuck with 98 then i dont think you can use the mmc drivers anyway , ... hmm on a unrelated note: if you do upgrade to 2k i would recommend a full install ( just makes a new wint dir if you chose not to re-format and keeps all your other files in tact ) as the upgrade option tends to break ALOT of things.

[fhyamaia]

Hey lucindrea,

I tried that "hack", and noticed the same thing: when you open the settings pannel, it erases the configuration. But I'll try it without opening the configuration pannel (even on W98, who knows, it might work). :-)

Maybe that's why I wasn't able to see anything using the open source bt8x8 while capturing. It was capturing, but the image was not showing up, and I thought it wasn't working. I didn't even bother checking the resulting file. :-)

Like menace said, this takes a lot of time to adjust, but I'm having fun playing with it. :-)

Thanks again all for your help,
Fabio

[menace]

forgot to mention that I am using win98 SE with MMC7.5 and it works great--it hasn't crashed even once (a spectacular achievement for any wondows prog ) I will put the zipped MMC7.5 in my shared folder for kazaa and if you can catch me when I'm inline you can probably download it--it might take awhile--if I'm playing online i tend to disable most evreything else for best results.

Have you tried the 2.77mb/s VBR settings @ 720x480? I did a stargate episode last night and other than a very very small portion it was sweet! Beauty was that it was a capture then burn scenario--no Tmpgenc! if you can find the MMC7.5 go for it--it seems to work very well with win98 SE/win98

[fhyamaia]

Hey menace,

I haven't tried with that resolution, because my MMC 7.1 limits the second number (vertical lines?) to 240 only.

Indeed I was able to find MMC 7.5 on the Internet after wasting almost half a day looking for it. I have to try that tonight.

I heard that you have to get 2 DLL's to get MMC 7.5 to work with w98. I also got those 2 DLL's from a website somewhere. I can try to dig out those sites and post here if anybody is interested.

I'll let y'all know the results tomorrow.

Thanks for all your help,
Fabio

[fhyamaia]

Hey menace,

I've been trying to install MMC 7.5, but I can't get the TV Tuner to install (it doesn't even show up on the list of applications to install).

Is there a secret to install TV Tuner 7.5? Everything else installed without problems, except the TV Tuner (which is exactly what I need).

Thanks once again,
Fabio

[menace]

You know thats ironic-I got the whole works and was trying to figure how to remove TV tuner! Actually I don't know why it would give you troubles, when in doubt its usually windows. Seriously though you might need to update the ATI drivers so that the MMC recognizes the tuner ability--just a guess, but i'm not really sure

[fhyamaia]

Hey menace,

Yeah, I figured there might be something with Windows. I tried to play with the open source drivers, and that didn't work either.

Anyway, I found a way to capture at an acceptable quality. I tried lucindrea's suggestion: capture at a high resolution and at a high bit rate, then run it through TMPGEnc.

At 640x240 and CBR 5Mb/s, I was dropping a few frames (not much though), but since I wanted something almost perfect, that wasn't acceptable for me. That was probably because of my not so fast CPU.

So I finally reached the value of 480x240, CBR of 5Mb/s and motion estimate of 99%, MPEG-2 file. I then ran this file through TMPGEnc, and the result was a very nice VCD file.

Of course, it took me almost 1 1/2 hours for a 50min movie, but that was OK... I let it run overnight.

I think I finally found what I was looking for. Thank you all for your suggestions, comments and help.

Fabio

[fhyamaia]

Actually, that was Andy's suggestion (quickfamily), but you got the idea.

fabio