ATI Radeon AIW -- capture to 352x240 standard VCD

[PacMan_]

I am interested in capturing to MPEG-1 VCD compliant format. My system is a celeron 433 with 256 MB of ram + 40 gig HD. I have read reports of frame dropping / poor quality with high resolution captures using this card, but how does it perform when capturing to the VCD 2.0 standard (352x240, 44.1khz, etc)? Can I expect a good capture with my setup? ... Am I correct in understanding that the mpeg encoding is not hardware accelerated? Thanks for any help.

[PacMan_]

To clarify a little, what I want to know is wether or not it is actually possible to capture directly to an MPEG1 file that you can immediately burn onto a VCD, and have a resonable quality, using this card, with my system. I have seen a lot of posts about mpeg2 but no posts that answer this specific question about mpeg1 for a vcd-type scenario.

[RFontenot]

Yes, it is possible, but not with your system. The AIW uses software MPEG compression and is very CPU intensive. You need at least an 800MHz PIII to be even moderately happy with the product. Don't be fooled by the claims on the box.

If you don't want to upgrade your system, look at a hardware MPEG encoder card, like Dazzle or Hauppauge PVR.

RF

[spiderman2k1]

I have the All In wonder radeon card 32meg DDram I have a
p2 400 and can make VCD with no problem with no fame drop's at all thanks 352*240 no problem at all. there are some thing you can do to help on when your pc start's up and the ati bar is on the side of you monitor start the TV then shut it off then hit "Crtl ALt Delete" start from the top shut down every thing that's not ATI program and do not shut down
Explorer or Systray then start up the tv again hit record if you see frames dropping it oh ok wait until it hit's 1%frames drop then stop recording after this you should have no frame drop's I have record up to 5 hour's with no frame dropp's at all on a P2 400 I can not do SVCD

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: spiderman2k1 on 2001-09-05 09:50:21 ]</font>

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: spiderman2k1 on 2001-09-05 09:51:36 ]</font>

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: spiderman2k1 on 2001-09-05 09:53:06 ]</font>

[Mantar]

Win98: A better way to do that is to go to C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM and run MSCONFIG.EXE - there you'll find a tab labeled "Startup" that shows all the programs loaded by Windows automatically. Uncheck the ones you don't need, like say, the LoadPowerProfile ones, and when you reboot you won't have those programs taking up resources. Right click on My Computer and check the performance tab to see the percentage of system resources available. >90% is good. <80% is terrible.
And you might want to have a look at doing AVIs with FreeVCR - it can do > 4 gig captures, and has real-time noise reduction which helps your quality a lot. Then just encode it with TMPGEnc and you've got fantastic quality.
Oh - you will either want the beta 7, or the beta 9 french version of FreeVCR. The beta 8 has problems capturing sound, and the english beta 9 isn't out yet.
Also, don't forget to pick up HuffyUV to keep the AVI from running too high a bandwidth for your hard drive.
Real-time encoding is always lower quality than encoding from an AVI.

(So says a happy Radeon AIW owner.)

[Warren2B9]

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On 2001-09-04 11:34:35, PacMan_ wrote:
I am interested in capturing to MPEG-1 VCD compliant format. My system is a celeron 433 with 256 MB of ram + 40 gig HD. I have read reports of frame dropping / poor quality with high resolution captures using this card, but how does it perform when capturing to the VCD 2.0 standard (352x240, 44.1khz, etc)? Can I expect a good capture with my setup? ...
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No. I have 1Ghz AMD 256MB memory with AIW Radeon. I have found capturing to VCD standard directly produces a very poor result - less than low VHS. I up the bit rate on the capture to nearly 3 Mb/sec - about 1.6 GB files instead of .6 for an hour show. Then render to VCD using tmpgenc or nero or Videowave. The result is better - about low VHS - which I am begining to think is as good as home VCDs get.

[patrickm]

the VCD captures really aren't too great in terms of quality, particularly from noisy VHS tapes. SVCD, on the other hand, can be excellent and often match or surpass TMPG, but does require a fast computer.

[PacMan_]

Well I've decided to err on the side of power, bought a WinTV PVR on lunch today. Going to try it once I get home. I was going to get a Dazzle II, but it is nowhere to be found in my area. My plan is to return the WinTV and mail order the Dazzle, if I am not satisfied with the quality. I've read massively conflicting reports about the WinTV. I'll post a followup once I've tried it.

[Erwin]

Just get the ATI AIW Pro 32 along with Ulead Video Studio and capture with these setting on the template:
Video data rate: 1150Kbps
Audio: 44100/ 224Kbps
and have the video quality up to 11 on the "performance level"

Use Nero 5.5, pull the files over and turn off "VCD compliance".

You have an instant quality VCD (in my oppinion) without occupying hours or days of your quality time to encode

Now, you can use the "VCD capture setting" in Ulead when you're capturing live video from cable and it looks fine, but I would suggest using the above setting for VCR capturing.
It works for me.

[vivisimonvi]

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On 2001-09-05 13:11:18, Warren2B9 wrote:
I have 1Ghz AMD 256MB memory with AIW Radeon. I have found capturing to VCD standard directly produces a very poor result - less than low VHS. I up the bit rate on the capture to nearly 3 Mb/sec - about 1.6 GB files instead of .6 for an hour show. Then render to VCD using tmpgenc or nero or Videowave. The result is better - about low VHS - which I am begining to think is as good as home VCDs get.

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I have the AIW PRO 32MB AGP card. I agree this method produces VCD a LOT better than direct VCD capture. It sucks having to wait so damn long to encode (I have a PII). I have just enough harddrive space to set the bitrate up to 5 or 6 M Bit/Sec and the resulting VCD looks AWESOME (I used the HIGH quality motion search accuracy on TMPGEnc).

[tobind]

Well, I've been playing with this stuff for a while..
Here's what I've found.
I can capture what I consider good quality VHS straight to my hard-drive with the AIW Radeon on my p450 III.
I followed one of the tutorials offered here for tweaking the radeon.
What works for me on a straight capture is 352x240 with a bitrate of 2500kbits, (or XVCD) then using nero with compliance turned off...
Even better I've found (though I can't capture "live&quot but using an animation program (lightwave 3d) is 720x480 as an avi then using "TMPGEnc" to produce a 720x480 mpeg 1 at 2500kbits. (AWSOME!)
Check the DVD database to see what your unit can handle, then play with a 2 minute or so clip at different Res and bitrates.
I'm looking forward to upgrade my processor so I can get those 720x480 captures of Farscape!. :')