Hey all,

For reference, here is what I'm planning todo. I have a friend who has library of tv shows (cartoons and such) on vhs, and I''d like to capture and digitize them. My end goal is to have them watchable on computer (via monitor & Tv-out) and maybe also in (S)VCD form. (My friend has a stand alone DVD player and no tv-out, so he'd prefer copies in VCD form. I on the other hand don't have DVD, and wouldn't mind watching them either on my monitor or through tv-out on the graphics card).

I'm running an XP1700, 256MB-DDR, and 40GB HD. My capture card is an MSI GF4-MX440 (Using a phillips (7108E ?) chip).

So the plan is to capture the source in either in huffy or mjpeg(19) (heh, gonna take up about half my drive per episode). Then convert to DivX (for computer playback) and MPEG-1/2 (for the (S)VCD). And then of course delete the original cap. All in all a rather lengthy, but do-able process (I hope? heh).

I'm new to digital video, although I've been reading everything I can find for the last few weeks, and I'm still left with a few questions that I'm hoping someone might be able to answer

- Is there much difference (relating to end result quality) of caping in huffy vs mjpeg(19) considering what my destination formats are (DivX and MPEG-1/2)?

- What the max resolution is that I should be able to cap in with the phillips chip and my computer? (I should be able to figure this one out by trial and error)

Finally, about interlacing. From what I've read, deinterlacing is best if you want to playback on a monitor, while non-interlaced is good for TV. Considering that I want to do both (monitor vs tv-out & DVD player) what would be my best bet? Does interlaced on Monitor look worse then deinterlaced on TV? I don't mind the "interlaced video on interlaced display" look (that you get on a tv) and would be fine with that quality on the monitor. So i'm thinking,

Are there any media players out there that can play interlaced video, possibly mimmicking what a tv does? (eg. Taking interlaced 30FPS video, and for each interlaced frame, extracting the 2 fields. Then overlaying each field on the previous image, at 60fields /sec. So essentially you get 60FPS video, where each new frame is simply the previous frame plus the next field drawn over it?

I figure if the above method is possible, then you don't need to deinterlace (and suffer the loss of quality that comes with the various techniques).

Your help is much appreciated, Thanks

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