Which format to use 24-bit RGB, YUV2,YUV9,YUV12??

[mymxv]

Hello all,

I'm a newbie to this stuff, so please go easy on me. I just installed a WinTV capture card and WinVCR software for real time mpeg2 encoding. Overall, I'm happy with the quality for making VCD and SVCD. My question is with the format. WinVCR offers 7 different format to choose from, but not all is supported. I manage to get 4 to work with my setup.

24-bit
YUV2
YUV9
YUv12

My question is which format will give me the best picture quaility when capturing to Mpeg1 and Mpeg2. I don't have any problems with frames dropping or voice not synching up.

This is my setup
AMD 1.33Mhz 266FSB
45gig IBM 7200 ATA100
256meg PC-133
Geforce 32meg MX-400

Thanks in advance

[mymxv]

Come on guys. Someone must have an answer to this.

[Vejita-sama]

http://www.geocities.com/lukesvideo

See if that helps. To a certain extent it depends on your capture card. 24RGB is the best, but if you have a cheap card you might not be able to get the high resolutions w/ dropped frames or noise.

[Cart Wheel]

Actually, 99% of all capture cards digitize the image in a YUV 4:2:2 format. YUY2 (YUV2) and UYVY are both YUV 4:2:2 formats. Capturing in RGB24 is generally a waste of space and system resources. In your case, using YUV2 will almost surely provide the best quality.

-Cart
http://www.geocities.com/lukesvideo/index.html

[AceofSpd]

See if you can install the codec for HuffYUV. Read about it at http://www.math.berkeley.edu/~benrg/
This is freeware from the makers of avisyth
Greg

[ironwood321]

It all depends on what codec you want to use.
pure YUV will allow you to use mpeg 4 and huffyuv with some tweaking.

But if you need to use huffyuv slightly faster, The DV codec or some other codec like MJPEG you will need RGB24.
Otherwise your codec will not be available to select.

If you want a good codec which won't hamper performance the ones I recommend are huffyuv if you have a fast machine. If you don't the commercial DV codec from mainconcept is an option this use RGB24 and allows capture at 720x576 and 720x480 and half resolutions used for VCD only.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: ironwood321 on 2001-09-17 09:26:07 ]</font>

[Cart Wheel]

Umm, YUY2 and UYVY works just fine with Huffyuv, and all the DV and MJPEG codecs I've tried can also use YUY2. YUY2 is faster than RGB24 too. The only time I'd use RGB24 is to overcome a colorspace conversion bug in PICVideo MJPEG (and perhaps other MJPEG codecs) that produces inaccurate color when capturing in YUY2.

-Cart
http://www.geocities.com/lukesvideo/index.html

[thxkid]

I have a capture card just like yours, I capture using the YUV12 at 352x240 with no recomprssion AVI. Then either use TMPGE Beta A to encode to my own XVCD at 2520 bitrate, or use Ulead Media Pro 6.0VE to edit the AVI's then encode my finished product using TMPGE at 2520 XVCD burn using NERO 5.5 and have a great VCD. Been doing this for a couple of years with great results.
I have recently switched over using VirtualDub instead of the software that comes with WinTV, mush better results.
If you don't have a very fast machine you may get frame drops with YUV12 if so then drop down to YUV9, it still works very good.
Also if you use a edit program like Ulead or premiere make sure to use the Uncompressed AVI codec setup, zero picture lose with you finished AVI.