Anyone able to capture and encode in real-time to DivX+MP3??

[PeterZ]

After *many* different trials (see http://www.vcdhelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=119454), I'm coming to the <sad> conclusion that I'm not able to perform capture the way I'd like to without causing system freeze/lockup.
Here's what I'm trying to achieve:

- Video Capture: 320x240, 29.97fps, real-time DivX encoding (1000kbps), AND
- Audio capture: 44kHz, stereo, 16-bit, real-time MP3 encoding (128kbps)

As soon as I try to capture simultaneously Video AND Audio the system freezes after a few mns of capture. I can however capture DivX Video only, or Audio only, or ~uncompressed video (Huffyuv) with uncompressed Audio; but never the setup above...

Therefore my question: is ANYONE able to perform the capture mentioned above (with simultaneous DivX and MP3 real-time encoding)? For those who can, what's you system and software environment?

TIA,

[PeterZ]

Well well well... after 3 full days sitting here, I've had zero response (neither negative, but more importantly nor positive). Does it mean that absolutely no-one has ever been able to do such captures?

Let me rephrase this then: has anyone at least _tried_ to do that, and what were the results? Someone MUST have tried, no?

And yeah, I promise, I won't get that bumped again (but hey, it was already down to the e/o page 2, so...).

PeterZ.

[vitualis]

I haven't done any capturing for a while but I did read through the other thread with interest as you did some quite exhaustive testing.

You may not be getting many answers simply because most people wouldn't capture to DivX directly and MP3. DivX isn't really that good a capture codec and I strongly recommend that you use a MJPEG codec or HuffyUV (and capture at a high bitrate) and then subsequently encode to DivX.

For your problem, however, my "hunch" is that you have a semi idiosyncratic problem with the sound card (i.e., your mobo audio). I personally think that the included audio is generally pretty horrible (especially if you are doing audio type tasks like capturing) and you should get new soundcard in any case, but this "may" solve your problem too...

Regards.

[PeterZ]

I appreciate the feedback. I'm starting to agree on the "ugly audio" argument, although sound quality wise I'm not unhappy at all. I have the audio out go to my Hi-Fi amp. and enjoy all the MP3/DVD/TV/... sound will full power in my good ole' huge JBL speakers, very nice! I'd never go back to using the regular lousy PC speakers, oh no

Now, as for using the on-Mobo AC'97 audio "card" for capture, I don't have any expertise there to decide, other than the problems I'm having with video+audio capture. To answer yr question, I've been able to capture about half hour of MJPEG and HuffYuv with MP3 (or PCM) without any lockup (I think, I need to re-check on that; otoh I've had audio sync pbms, video getting progressively late). However, I soon as I use the DivX5 codec during capture (*with* audio capture), the PC locks up, whatever the audio format I use, from MP3 down to plain uncompressed!

Why would the audio card not be a problem when using "light" video compression like HuffYuv, but lockup when I use heavy compression like DivX...? That's the $1M question... Dropping frames, that I'd understand - but lockup??

Also, I'm trying to keep things simple, I would really, really love to avoid the required extra steps of converting from HuffYuv to DivX as a post-capture step; too much of a hassle, often introduces sync. problems, time consuming, hard to manage multi-10GB's sized files, etc...

[gll99]

I can use Winvdr to capture audio mp3 but I usually use mpeg4 v3 to do it instead of divx.

When I use it, I set my audio to 44k stereo 96kbps and res 320x240 and 1800kbs video bitrate + 29.97 framerate.

I haven't tried other settings recently but have no problems at all. I am sure I could use higher settings because my system is not overtaxed.

I have a P4 1.6 and 512 DDR ram.

[PeterZ]

I have a P4 1.6 and 512 DDR ram.

... and you're running Win98SE? Have you downgraded or something!?

More seriously: now finally someone who confesses on doing that (or similar, MPEG4 and DivX are really two flavours of the same product afaik). Glad to hear that.

There are a number of differences b/w yr setup and mine, most notably the processor (P4 1.6GHz vs Athlon 1.2G), O.S. (98SE vs XP) and DRAM type (DDRAM vs SDRAM). I'm also quite sure you don't have the same chipset (VIA KT133 in my case); do you have on-MoBo audio like I do, or is it a separate sound card?

Lastly, you use WinDVR; I've checked on this before but it looks too "user friendly" - my way of saying: you don't have enough fine control on yr capture parameters. How can you achieve MPEG4 capture, while all I see on the Indeo Web site is MPEG1 or MPEG2 formats period?

TIA,

[gll99]

Lastly, you use WinDVR; I've checked on this before but it looks too "user friendly"

First the product is WINVDR (V instead of D). I have both apps by the way and the other app windvr is for mpeg1 and mpeg2 and you can cap 16:9 too) .

I have many OS, Winme,2000,and xp pro but have chosen to remain with win98se for stability and compatibility with all my apps. I don't like chasing for drivers. I'll probably move over when most of the bugs are ironed out by you unpaid "Microsoft testers".

My Avermedia TVtuner card does the video caps and my onboard audio is good enough so I see no need to buy an extra sound card. I only use my speakers with the addon earphones plugs anyway.

Winvdr has a demo so you could try it. You can use any compatible avi codec on your drive just like any other capture app and adjust them pretty much the same way. I have Divx 5.02 but don't like it as much.
Winvdr also allows mpeg audio compression as well as mp3. It also captures to wmv7 or wmv8 as an extra option.

PS my ram is also a single chip 512 PC2700 (333) type. My cpu has a 512 L2 cache on it also and that may help a bit.

I still believe that you could do as much cause it doesn't tax my system at all.

[PeterZ]

gll99,

thanks A LOT for your feedback - I downloaded WinVDR and have been able to consistently capture up to 3 hours of video+audio in DivX/MP3 without a single freeze - GREAT!!!

What I suspect is going on is that I have selected the DivX/MPEG4 (slow motion) codec for video encoding, NOT the DivX5 codec; what I see is that it's much less taxing on the CPU as you rightly stated, which might be the reason why it works great for me (this is speculation though).

Not only that, but the 3 hours capture don't show any lip sync problem (barely noticeable anyway) up to the end of the 3 hours clip! And I can scroll up and down the entire clip in WMP8 (I'm under WinXP Pro) without a glitch, the image and sound play normally and realign instantly after I've stopped scrolling the slider... VERY nice, much better than I'm normally able to get.

I'll try WinVDR with DivX5 and MP3, but I'm expecting lockups in this configuration, unless WinVDR has s'thing "magic" that other capture tools don't have - but I doubt it.

Problem remaining: the only tools I know of that have good scheduling capabilities (i.e you can schedule multiple captures in any format you'd like at any time of the day/day of the week/etc...) are:

1- ATI MMC7.6 - but this tool crashes as soon as I launch the TV applet
2- PowerVCR II - but this one does not allow you to select the video codec you want to (dumb thing!)

I'm sure there must be other capture tools that combine both extensive scheduling capabilities AND free codec/format selection, but I don't know what they are.

Another area I'm looking into: the possibility to start, setup, program, and stop captures from a script or program that's *external* to the capture tool itself, so that I have full control over capture schedules and setups from outside (e.g. I could program captures from a Web browser...). D'you know of any video capture tool that "exposes" such an interface to the outside world? Now _that_ would be great!

Anyway, THANKS A LOT again, it looks like I'm out of the woods now as far as lockups' are concerned!

PeterZ.

[fingernailX]

I wish I could capture 320 by 240 straight to Divx and be happy with it but since I am capturing NTSC interlaced TV and one of the fields is 'thrown away' when not doing XXX by 480 captures I am always unhappy with the quality of the result regardless of the codec. By capturing at least 352 by 480 and then 2 pass vbr reencoding and resizing to 320 by 240 Divx 5.02 you'll be much happier with the results than capturing at a smaller size.

[PeterZ]

Well, I'd say that I'm VERY happy to not get system lockups anymore (believe me this was a real pain!); as for the capture quality itself, I'm convinced much better results could be achieved, but I just don't have the time and/or the patience to go thru the multiple capture and processing steps you're suggesting. I just don't think the ratio of additional effort (pain) to additional end product quality works out *for me*, that's all.

Btw this is also related to the other issue I mentioned (probably good for starting a new topic in this forum, but I'll look around first), namely the fact that most of these video capture/editing tools do not allow control from external programs or scripts, you HAVE to have manual interventions. Obviously since most of the tools I'm using are freeware, I will certainly not complain about this - quite the contrary.

However, if those tools allowed external control, such that I could write scripts or pgms to automate the various steps, i.e.:
1- Start a capture tool at a programmable time
2- Set it up for the kind of capture I want to do (e.g. full featured movie vs half hour series on TV); this include *any* parameter I can setup manually, e.g. video source, format, size, resolution, compression, etc... same for audio.
3- Start the capture
4- Stop the capture
5- Process the capture automatically upon completion, i.e. trim if needed, compress to e.g. DivX5, MP3, de-interlace, whatever...
6- Re-sync audio and video if needed
7- Save the resulting "product"

then, and only then, I might want to consider a multi-pass procedure... But hey, maybe all of that is possible already, I'm just not aware of which tools would allow this...

[gll99]

Hi PeterZ:

One feature you may want to try with Winvdr Pro is under "Option" and "Setup Video Size Format" then choose "Use Cubic Filter" and "Show Real size". This feature allows capture at 480 and then auto resize back to 240. The "show real size" displays faster because the video is left distorted at 480 on the screen but the cap is adjusted to 240 and is ok.
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The following freeware program MSDDVR2000 is a work in progress. It allows setting multiple timed captures like a digital vcr, same time each day, once a week or ad hoc. The only drawback right now is that it only captures from the tuner card (no vcr or svideo unless hooked to tuner coax) and only accepts the wm7 and wm8 codecs and also only at certain preset settings.

This product is still in development and hopefully the author will add support for other codecs in the future. Its worth keeping an eye on.

http://www.maksil.com/

[crahak]

Well, I must say, if all these other people are all doing mjpeg/huffyuv captures (including myself) there has to be reasons... It's the classic way, it works great, and you get good quality captures... There seems to be lots of people wanting to do divx/mp3 captures, but if you could compare the results of that and the "traditionnal" way, I think the results would be quite different... Anyways, good luck

[bpjenn]

For good quality capture with Divx you must set the video bit rate to at least 4000kbps and only 320x240. Then, transcode the audio to mp3. Virtualdub will allow you to do this. I have captured 20 plus years of home videos at 6000kbps using this method and the quality is very good but the file sizes are rather large. I get between 25-30MB per minute after transcoding the audio to mp3. This is also the fastest way. You can go the other route and spend a lot more time transcoding from huffyuv or MJPEG but you will not get any better quality. I've tried every conceivable method (filters, 640x480, etc), and many hours, to get small files and good quality video, but no matter what I've tried, the bit rate needs to be above 4000kbps unless you like seeing artifacts/blockiness.

[crahak]

Capturing at 6000kbps DivX? I think lots of systems will be dropping lots of frames, even if resolution if way low. I find 640x480 WILL give much better results. I think mostly everyone agrees on this one, the bigger source, the better. Also, if you don't want to leave it as is, no mtter which codec you captured with (unless you mean to leave it as DivX 6000kbps, which I see as pointless, it's basically too much for a DVD Rip...) then you're spending time anyhow. Filters can help, but it's sort of limited. Most DivX Rips are way below 4000kbps and there is hardly any artifacts/blockyness if it's VBR encoded (which you want, and is another good reason why not to capture straight DivX anyways). I think most people would agree that the "well known" method is much better... But you'll always get someone that found some other way and loves it. Oh well.

[PeterZ]

gl99: I actually tried the 320x480 cap thing, however the 'Use Cubic Filter" check box gets grayed out as soon as I select a vertical resol. above 288; and the resulting capture is distorted (well, 480 instead of 240) but also shows interlacing stripes... Btw I always have the preview *off* when capturing (to reduce load on CPU).
Otoh it looks like when I do select the cubic filter (at 320x240x30fps) I do get a slightly better image (DivX compressed); is that possible, and why?

MSDDVR2000: I only capture from the composite video i/p, not from the tuner part, so I guess I'll have to check it later and see if it evolves in that direction. Thanks again for the tips.


bpjenn:

For good quality capture with Divx you must set the video bit rate to at least 4000kbps and only 320x240.

well, this pretty much defeats the very purpose of DivX which is to perform better than other codecs at *very low* bit rates, e.g. 800kbps which is what I use (800 to 1200kbps) -i.e NOT at 4000kbps! At those rates most codecs perform "well"... Remember, one of the key goals of DivX is to allow to compress a full movie into a single CD-R with a quality somewhere b/w VHS and MPEG2 (depending on how much effort you put in the compression process, in my case ~ none --> just a tad better than VHS for me!

Again, what I want to do is capture TV stuff on a regular basis, maybe a couple or more caps a day (series, sports, etc...) and I do NOT have the time to go thru the long, manual process that's required to get the best quality. Unless - I can fully automate the entire process, but I've got no positive feedback on that - yet!

[lusid]

Try Showshifter.