insight please

[defsrg]

after a month of playing around i've come to some conclusions, if anyone feels like making additions to my statements as to the possible legitamacy of them please do, these are just my own personal opinions.
i started this whole excursion with my ati aiw 7500 radeon for capture, oh yeah here are the rest of my specs just so you know. windows xp prof.,athlon 1.3 gig. 1 gig of ram and a 60 gig hd, so that i could capture things off my tivo and burn them. my captures were grainy so some answers to my previous posts were the ati's were notorious for grainy captures. so i got into tivo extraction and split and muxing etc. etc. however my burned products still looked grainy. so here are my conclusions : maybe my aiw isnt really the problem as by reading i have found these things out. first of all i have one 60 gig hd,which has been defraged recently btw, that only has 20 gig of available space. i have read where you should set up an extra drive just for capture and maybe this is the reason for both my shoddy captures and extraction products. also i play then back on a sony wega thats hdtv ready, my products look grainy on this tv but not as bad on my cheap 27 sanyo. not sure if i am right on any of these things but these are the conclusions i have drawn,if i am wrong please correct me so as to help others thanx

[macleod]

your hardware is going to have "some" impact on what you capture, but it isn't the final product. The larger questions are what are you using to cap and then what are you capping, are you using huffyuv,mjpeg, uncompressed,?????? what are the resolutions that you are capping in, what product are you using to encode the video, what filters are you using.

I have been doing this for a little while and have been getting good captures on my ATI-tv wonder pci card capping using iuvcr with mjpeg set on 18 with a 480 x 480 initial resolution and then encoding down to 352x240 using some filters depending on what I am initially capping. Actually, most of the time, I just cap 480x480 and do CVD and the quality is almost the original.

"grainy" video sounds like you a doing a 352x240 1150BR cap on some 20 year old tape or off of a TV show in real time and not encoding using something else. Are you capping avi or are you doing mpeg.

What guides have you read?

[kitty]

I'd like to add to above:

1) Cap at the highest resolution you feel comfortable without frameloss and given your Harddisk free size - in your MPEG conversion you can always size down.
2) Yes your capture codec will play an important part - huffyuv is lossless but bulky. Many use MJPEG with good results. If you get a second HD you can try uncompressed (huge).
3) TV comes interlaced and when you do conversions you might get a comb effect which is the interlace showing. Virtualdub and TMPGenc have settings to reduce this.
4) Consider SVCD 480x480 or at least CVD 352x480 MPEG2 - if you are watching on a bigscreen this will look better than VCD 352x240 MPEG1 - also with MPEG2 you can use variable bitrate or higher bitrates than VCD to get clearer pictures especially with motion.

Get a test clip - a couple of minutes is plenty. Try the different methods to see what works for you.

[defsrg]

damn sorry knew i was forgetting something, when capturing i am using mmc 7.6, mpeg 2, 480x480, vbr 5.00, and then encoding and authoring with ulead dvd movie factory and yes i am sorta cpaturing real time tv but they are recorded programs on a directivo. hope this info helps. i use to use tmpgenc to encode but it always crashes whne trying to open an mpeg 2 file, dont know why?