Getting rid of video head switching noise from MPG captures.

[energy80s]

I am a newbie at this. Have just started to capture MPEG1 files via an ATI AIW Pro 128 card with the idea of making my own VCD's. Rather than capture live TV / camera footage, I wish to capture old VHS / SVHS video footage. However, I noticed that I am getting the "video head switching noise" along the extreme bottom of the captured file - this can also be seen on your TV screen if it is underscanning. What I would like to know is if it is possible to eliminate this (probably by cropping or masking) during the actual live capture to MPG rather than working on a pre-captured file. I am using version 7.1 of the ATI Multimedia suite and using the TV app to actually capture the PAL stream via the S-Video input.

For the record, my machine has an AMD K2-500 processor with 64Mb (soon to be upgraded to 256Mb) of RAM.

[FiEND]

if I was going to do this, I would first figure out how many lines I would need to 'crop'.

then I would use virtual dub to capture to avi in a custom format, so if I needed to crop 3 lines I would capture in 352*291 (352*243) then when I encode it I would crop the 3 lines for 352*288 (352*240).

of course this is just hypothetical as some things just dont work like they should/could.

[energy80s]

Thanks for the suggestion, however I am very wary of using Virtual Dub as I installed it before and it messed up my computer, needing a complete re-install of Windows to fix. Also, Vdub seems to be shareware as it was putting text across the image as it captured. Also I would really prefer to capture in MPEG as I don't want the hassle (or have the hard disk space/fast processor) for large avi to mpeg conversions.

I haven't actually burnt any VCD's yet (just captured some video onto the HD) so maybe the disturbance at the bottom of the picture won't be visable when viewed on a normal TV (just like with VHS playback) so maybe I'm worrying over nothing. Thanks anyway for the help.

[FiEND]

virtual dub cannot bork your system as it does not have any install program, you simply unzip it and run the .exe - i dont think it even adds anything to the registry as it uses its own .ini files.

the shareware text you saw was from a video codec that you installed and tried to use inside of virtual dub, such as a mjpeg codec. they do this until you enter a purchase code.

capturing to avi, such as mjpeg can do a hour in as little as 3GB and very good quality (less if you really require) and only uses about 20-30% cpu useage on my celeron 600.

yes, it is possible that the interference wont be visible, I would give it a try.