AIW 128 Pro quality help required

[Corkey]

Hi,

Recently got the AIW Pro 128 64Mb (Rage chipset) and have been trying to capture PAL from the TV tuner. So far can manage relatively poor quality VCD MPEG1 files, with slightly off audio (as predicted here), but MPEG2 captures are all crap - regardless of the settings chosen

Does anyone here have experience of capturing with this card to good (ie at least VHS) quality? I have also tried Win VCR, VirtualDub, Vegas Video and CinePlayer DVR (this doesn't support the Rage chipset) without any luck.

If I try AVI capture with PicVideo codecs, I get better video quality, but the files are HUGE and I get 5% to 8% dropped frames that give stuttering playback.

Basically I want to be able to burn either VCD or SVCD for playback on a standalone DVD machine.

Also, I heard that my soundcard (Soundblaster 12 is known to have synch problems - can anyone help on that score?

Other parts of the system - Athlon 850, 512Mb PC100 RAM, 40 GB HDD, Win ME.

Hope someone can help

[antisense]

Okay, here is my two cents:
First, do you have MMC 7.5? That is damn important because the general concensus around here is that 7.5 drastically improved the quality of the Mpeg-2 captures. Just to let you know I am an NTSC person, so take all this with caution (me never having used any pal settings on my card). Okay, next question, why are your mpeg1 files out of sync? My mpeg1 files were never out of sync! I do agree about the poor mpeg1 quality. Now, two basic suggestions that you have probably heard before: jack up the bitrate on captures, and re-encode with tmpgenc. You will need to spend a lot of time learning exactly what will produce your desired results from tmpgenc. And yes, the ati card is a crazy hog of processor power, so you may need to think about upgrading your computer. This may or may not help, since I am just a novice. Stick with this, and repost if and when you achieve your desired results!

[Nelson37]

More processor speed will help, but you need a 2nd hard drive (2nd channel no slave) for capture to cut down frame drops.

w/Athlon 1.4, AIW 128, 1gig Ram, 60G capture drive, both 98 and XP, frame drops way under 1% w/either MPG1 or MPG2 or AVI, motion 99, bitrates 8 to 15. Real-time SVCD w/MMC 7.5 is VERY CLOSE to acceptable quality, like good 2nd gen VCR except for high-motion blockiness.

My current method-of-the-week is cap MMC 7.5, MPG2, bitrate 10, motion 99, IP frames set to 1, 720x480 or 480x480. Demux video w/TMPGenc, rip WAV w/FLASK, DVD2AVI the vid, AVISYNTH w/mpeg2dec for resize, load avs and wav into vdub for edit commercials, frameserve to CCE 4pass 2000-2400-2800. AV sync is good, video quality excellent. Now do 2 of these and call me in the morning.

[Corkey]

OK - thanks guys.

I have MMC 7.5 and Stinky's tool 0.85. I have found that a complete deinstall / reinstall of all ATI drivers and MMC has sorted the out of synch MPEG1 situation. I can get almost acceptable results now with the bitrate up to something over 18000, and my DVD player will still play them if I demux.remux with TMPGenc.

On the MPEG2 front - the route described by Nelson seems an awful lot of work, but when I get a couple of days to "play" with capturing, I may just give it a go. Did try one capture at around 24000 video which was demuxed / remuxed with BBMpeg - this worked, but the video was still not quite as good as I had expected.

Plans are afott to upgrade the machine to an Athlon 1800XP with lots of DDRAM and possibly a 2nd HDD for captures, but that depends on getting enough cash for my birthday next week

Again, thanks for the pointers, I'll report back when I have done some more experiments.

Bye for now.

[sambahri]

does avi-io works with mmc 7.5 and ati all in wonder 128..
it use to work with mmc 3.6