Best quality capture with good compression, looking for.....

[Bigpeat1]

I have been reading the board for about 3 weeks now and have tried several of the capture/conversion programs offered.
-TMPGenc
-VirtualDub
I have the ATI AIW 128 Pro and am looking for the best program to use and a suggested file type to save it as when capturing from the TV tuner on the card. I have tried VCD @ 1.15 Mb/sec and the resolution is so-so. I have also captured as an AVI @8.0 Mb/sec....great resolution but Killer file size for short capture.
I am not able to use Virtual Dub 1.4.8 with MMC 7.1 for it says "No capture driver available" and I do not know how to install the WDM Wrapper that I have seen in posts. I see some great South Park captures saved as "(file name) diVx.AVI. These are 23 minute captures with very good resolution and a file size of from 45MB to 87MB.

My goal is two fold....I would like to capture good quality with reasonable file size and would like to capture and record onto a CD-RW for playback on Sony DVP-S560 DVD player. Could someone suggest an ATI AIW compliant program and a file type to save it as first and then a conversion program to use ?...I will try to do the rest on my own.

Thanks ~

[Sulik]

Did you try MPEG2+deinterlace, 480x480 P:4 B:2 at 4Mbps in MMC ?
You can make it SVCD compliant (search the forum for instructions about remuxing in TMPGENC), and it should work on any DVD player that supports SVCD.
The ultimate solution if you want higher quality would be to use DVD resolution and bitrates (720x480 @ 6+Mbps)

[kc5hwb]

I have the same video card you do and I capture files as MPEG1 at 1.15Mbps and it works fine. The is required for VCD 2.0 compliance.

DivX is OK, but is an MPEG4 compression, so the quality is not as high.

I am using the software that comes with the ATI card, but I am also looking for some better software with more features. Good Luck....

[ratt794]

I also have the same card. This setting works very well for TV Tuner and Analog S-Video capture:

Using the ATI MMC 7.1 software:
MPEG-2 De-interlaced and Visual Masking on
480x480 resolution
Stereo 16 Bit Audio
P=4, B=2 which is default
Motion quality = 100
Motion Search 32 horiz. and 16 Vert.
Bitrate 2.5 Mbit constant or 3.0 variableb (Use CBR for editing)

The Quality is excellent and going higher with the bitrate does not make enough difference to justify it. You need at least a 1GHz CPU to not drop frames - my old Duron 750 would not quite do it by my Athalon 1100 does. Using these settings gives about 35-40 minutes on a CD-Rom or SVCD disk with Nero 5.5.

Regards,

Rob

[kc5hwb]

What is the purpose of having a square resolution 480x480 size file? Isn't it better to have a 4:3 ratio resolution size?

[Nelson37]

480x480 is SVCD "standard". More lines of resolution means sharper picture, most if not all DVD players will stretch this to fit your TV. The downside is that higher bitrate is required to maintain quality.
I have the AIW 128 also, and while I find realtime SVCD capture is 90% of the time excellent, as always, chasing that last 10% is the trick.
My current method is to capture at 720 or 480 by 480, bitrate 8 to 10, then re-encode with TMPGenc or CCE. With Digital Cable input, I edit out commercials and the result is Very Close to DVD quality, and I can get up to 55+ minutes on one CD.
As to the DivX question, quality is debatable but playback is currently PC ONLY, will NOT play on DVD player. (yet)