Help on Capturing From TV directly to VCD

[giorge]

Hello everyone,

Since i'm new to this i want some information on how to record from TV and make VCD out of the recorded. My question is that what is the best way (hanrdware/software) to record a Music-concert of about a 1 1/2 to 1 3/4 hours to the PC and than burn it on VCD or SVCD in the best quality. I understood that doing this you must record on the harddrive of the PC and than convert to MPEG-2 to burn. But almost 2 hours of recording is about couple of million GB of disk space????? My disk is 40GB. Is there a way to directly record to MPEG-2? Thats the only thing i want to do, record the music concert and burn it on VCD or SVCD (whats better) in the best Quality. How do i do this? Help please.

greetz from holland
Sjoerd Wegink

[chandran123]

If you would like to record it as VCD try the Terapin cd video recorder. It costs about $200. Just works like the good ol' VCR but records on CD's. If you are specific about SVC try Malata VCD/SVCD recorder.

[fhyamaia]

Hey giorge,

You didn't mention if you already have a capture card or not, but I'll assume you have a decent one.

Most capture softwares allows you to capture and save directly into MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 format, so the resulting file is not that big. If you save it into an AVI format, than you'll have a HUGE file, but if it is directly to MPEG-1 or MPEG-2, then the file size shouldn't be a problem.

Best quality would be achieved by creating an SVCD file (you loose a lot of quality doing in VCD format). For NTSC, SCVD specs are 480x480, 2.6MB/s CBR, MPEG-2 (someone correct me if I'm wrong). The only problem is that with those SVCD settings, I doubt you can get more than 30 minutes in one single CD.

Not so good quality would be achieved by creating a VCD file. For NTSC, the specs are 352x240, 1.15Mb/s CBR, MPEG-1 (again, someone correct me if I'm wrong). The good part is that you can fit around 80 minutes of film in one single CD. The bad part is, again, you loose quality.

And there are the "in betweens", which is what I use to copy VHS tapes to CDs. I capture at a resolution of 480x240, 6Mb/s CBR, MPEG-2, then run the resulting file through TMPGEnc (standard VCD template). The result is much better than capturing straight to VCD format.

I know, too much info, but I hope this helps.

Fabio

[Anonymous65]

If your looking for real-time VCD creation only, nothing will beat the PV231. http://steve.kittelsen.com/pv231