Capture question from TV video

[crgnjul]

I have just gotten an ATI Radeon 7500 All in Wonder and am using the MultiMedia Center 7.6. What I would like to do is capture 1 hour shows and then put them on 1 CD. I know I can use the standard VCD setting and do this. The quality is ok, but I would MUCH rather have it as SVCD. I use DVD2SVCD and it allows me to fit movies that are 2 hours and 5 minutes on 2 CD's. This tells me that I should be able to fit a 1 hour show onto 1 (80 minute) CD. I just can't seem to figure out what settings to use in the Digital VCR of the ATI Multimedia Center to use.
Can anyone help? I have searched these forums and if this answer is there, I can't find it.
TIA
Craig

[Savant]

It really depends on the quality you want. While MMC is OK for general capturing, if you are dealing with low bandwidth situations (like VCD and SVCD) then you are better capturing to AVI and then converting the output using TMPGenc.

I like to capture using VirtualDub with the huffyuv codec and then I use TMPGenc 2pass VBR to create the needed MPEG. At that point you can burn using whatever utility you're using.

The only downside is that you need a lot of hard disk space for the AVI file (about 30GIG I would estimate for 1 hour of video) but the resulting MPEG would be of much better quality than if you compress on the fly.

Regards,

Savant

[crgnjul]

Thanks for the tip. One thing I don't want to do is spend a lot of time encoding. I tried doing an AVI and then encoding it with TMPGenc but it took 20minutes to convert the first minute of the show. 20x show length is just way to long for me. Hard Drive space is not a concern, but time is. I don't need DVD2SVCD quality, but the VCD preset that came with MMC 7.6 just plain sucks!

Maybe I need to try VirtualDub. I have not tried it yet, but have looked at their site. I don't see anything on their site that talks a TV Tuner. Can it capture TV?
Craig

[Nelson37]

Make a custom template using 480x480, or 352x480, with a bitrate of approx 2000 to 3000. Tweaking the bitrate will change filesize for time-on-disk. tweaking resolution will allow better quality w/lower bitrates.
experiment with VBR/CBR, deinterlace, cropping, inverse pulldown to your personal tastes and DVD player capabilities.

[Savant]

Well settings vary the time DRAMATICALLY. I've used settings that will allow you to encode at less than half that time. It really depends on the quality you want. The better the quality, the longer the encode time.

I just found that the quality of video when compressing on the fly wasn't too hot.

If you want to capture on the fly, check the HOW TO sections on the left for capture. There is a section on ATI cards there.

Regards,

Savant

[crgnjul]

I have tried the how to . It looks ok when viewed in Media Player, but Nero tells me it is not VCD compliant (I tried it anyway, and got the sound but no video on my Apex 500w nor my Apex AD5131) Playing it on PowerDVD had about 1/2 of the pixels (in random blocks that changed locations as it played) not viewable.

I then tried encoding it with TMPGEnc (set to highest quality). Nero this time did not complain about it being noncompliant, but the quality was not any better than the VCD preset in MMC.

I guess I will try capturing as an AVI or "DVD preset" and then encoding it with TMPGEnc or Cinema Craft Encoder.

Craig

[Savant]

One of the problems with video capured using MMC is that the audio is not compliant. MMC captures audio at 44.1K and the format needs 48K. What I ended up doing was demuxing the file and then converting the audio track to 48K and then mux it back and it will work fine then.

Regards,

Savant