480x480 Capture Question

[Plant_Guy]

Hello,

I am looking for a utility that can caputure at 480x480 to create SVCD's. My config. is:

Athlon XP1600+
512MBRam
WinXP Home
AverTV stereo TV card

Can anyone tell me which programs are good for this purpose? I am looking to capture in compressed format on the fly for when I am in a hurry, and also for capture uncompressed for when I have time for post-processing. Thanks in advance for any help.

TomG.

[DVWannaB]

PG,

I will answer the part of your question concerning capturing uncompressed video.

I use Virtualdub as my capture program with either PICVideo MJPEG codec or Huffyuv codec to capture my AVI files. PICVideo, by my tests does a better job of saving hard drive space with good quality video. Which one you use will depend on the size of your hard drive (capture drive) and the length of your source video.

I dont do much real-time capture, because my cable broadcast channels have a lot of noise. I can count on one hand the number of channels I get where the picture is sharp and really clear and vivid colors. So I capture AVI and apply filters to clean up.

Hope that helps.

[Plant_Guy]

I saw that many people use Virtualdub on this forum. When I last looked, though, I did not see a 480x480 setting. Is there a config. option I need to enable this resolution? Thanks.

TomG.

[kinneera]

You have to go to "Video | Set Custom Format..." and select the resolution manually there.

[Plant_Guy]

Gentlemen,

After capturing to a low-loss or lossless codec, how long does it take to re-encode the (let's say 45 minutes of a TV show without commercials) video stream?

TomG.

[DVWannaB]

Its hard to say. I have only a 500 MHZ PIII 128MB RAM Win98se and it takes approx. 10-12 hours to render 45 mins of MPEG 2, using the SVCD template in TMPG.

With your machine it should be about half the time (just a guess).

[Plant_Guy]

Thanks for your help guys.

TomG.

[Plant_Guy]

OK,

I setup the custom format, and I get the error message "Unsupported Format". Then I set it to 640x480 which works with their included software, and it says the same thing. What's going on? Thanks for the help.

TomG.

[majunbubu]

Are you using WDM drivers? I have a Hauppauge card and am running WinXP and when I installed there WDM XP drivers I had the same issues I could not capture at 480x480 said it was an unsupported format. But I went back and removed those drivers and installed the Win2k drivers which are NOT WDM drivers and now I can capture at 480x480.

Hope that helps

[jamba]

I believe that your card uses a Booktree (Bt) based Windows WDM Driver. If so, you need to upgrade/replace these drivers with new ones to capture all the way to 720x480 (NTSC) or 720x576 (PAL).

Go to this site:

http://btwincap.sourceforge.net/

This should give you the drivers you need and all instructions necesary to make them run.

Good luck.

[Plant_Guy]

Jamba,

I followed the link and installed the drivers. When the machine rebooted, I was greeted with my first XP blue screen(BSOD)! Uninstalled the driver, and machine back to where this conversation first started. It was a good tip though. Thanks.

Plant_Guy

[Sorcerer]

you're getting the error messages before you need the mjpeg picvideo codec to capture first