Recommend free capture program?

[surefire]

Hi all, new member here,

Forgive my ignorance but I am new to the subject of video capture. I have purchased a Swann Ezycapture card with the intention of capturing analogue video from my video camera on to CD. I can get the latest drivers for the card for Win XP (my OS) from the Swann website but the supplied capture software is not Win XP compatible (sorry can’t remember the name). Can anyone recommend any free capture software that will recognise my card and do a reasonable job. If all goes well, I will purchase a better card and software in the future but I’m just testing the waters for now. I may be able to get my hands on Pinnacle Studio 7 in the near future, is this any good?

Another thing to bear in mind is that the Ezycapture card has no audio input so I will have to go thru the sound card and any capture software must be capable of combining video and audio.

On a slightly different subject, where are the codec’s stored in Win XP so I can see which one’s I have. I tried the AVIcodec utility but it reports exactly the same codec’s on my and a friends computer even though I know he has more codec's installed than I do? Strange.

Thanks

[LanEvo7]

Virtual Dub is one of the best capturing programs out there.

[housepig]

...but if Virtualdub doesn't do it for you, you can try Virtual VCR (freeware) or iuVCR (cheap).

check the Tools section, at left, under Capture - there are other free capture apps out there.

[Will Hay]

Yep, vurtualdub for me, superb and free.
If not, give FreeVCR a try, that's free too
There are plenty of guides on the site (the eft of your screen) to help, read them, you'll be glad you did
Oh, and one tip:
Format your capture hard drive before each capture and if you don't fancy paying for the superb MJPEG PicVideo codec then the free one, huffyuv (you'll found a link on this site), is great too (but system hungry and takes up massive space).
As for Pinancle Studio, I use 8.5 and absolutely love it, but I'd never use it for anaolgue capture, at least never again.
It suffered massive frame loss, although my (VHS) source wasn't entirely reliable.
The only time I use Studio 8 is for capturing from my digital camcorder.
I use it to edit of course but it's no good for analogue capture.
I capture with Virtualdub, encode with TMPGEnc, author with Ulead Movie Factory and then burn to dvdr.
Might seem a long process but for me it's the best process and IMO well worth it.
Good luck, and welcome!
Will

Ps. My capture card doesn't have audio in either, I use line in of my soundcard and set the capture card to record from the line in source, it works fine

[txpharoah]

With that card, go for AVI capturing and convert into MPEG2 (unless you want to attempt MPEG capture). VirtualDub is a good easy choice.

[surefire]

Thanks for the help chaps, I'll go with your suggestions and if I have any more problems I'll let you know.

By the way I've only been a member for a day or so but what I've read here has helped me tremendously already. Nice bunch of folks too. Keep up the goo work.

[Will Hay]

By the way I've only been a member for a day or so but what I've read here has helped me tremendously already. Nice bunch of folks too. Keep up the goo work.

Hey, goo work or no goo work, good luck anyway
Will

I am using a VideOh! PCI capture card and am interested in capturing things from VHS tapes.

txpharoah says:

With that card, go for AVI capturing and convert into MPEG2 (unless you want to attempt MPEG capture). VirtualDub is a good easy choice.

Should I be using AVI to capture rather than MPEG2 if I want to put them onto DVD directly?

Thanks.

[fmctm1sw]

virtualdub or virtualvcr

[MpegEncoder]

txpharoah says:

With that card, go for AVI capturing and convert into MPEG2 (unless you want to attempt MPEG capture). VirtualDub is a good easy choice.

Should I be using AVI to capture rather than MPEG2 if I want to put them onto DVD directly?

You've got a pretty fast machine but capturing directly to high quality mpeg-2 for DVD is still probably too much for it. That kind of encoding is extremely CPU intensive and even on a fast machine probably can't be done in real-time.

[housepig]

txpharoah says:
Quote:
With that card, go for AVI capturing and convert into MPEG2 (unless you want to attempt MPEG capture). VirtualDub is a good easy choice.

Should I be using AVI to capture rather than MPEG2 if I want to put them onto DVD directly?

If you go to avi, you can't go to dvd directly, except as a data file.

With some capture cards, the mpeg-2 encoding is hardware based and can give good results capturing directly to dvd-compliant mpeg files. Other capture cards use software encoding, and can produce a lower-quality file.

I use an Aver EZ DVDmaker capture card, and the quality of the final file is significantly better if I capture as an avi and reencode to mpeg-2 than if I capture directly to mpeg-2.

I think Txpharoah is suggesting that with the technical specs of the mentioned capture device, it will look better if you went the long way around, capturing to avi and converting after the fact, instead of capturing direct - not that you can capture an avi and author it directly to dvd.

if you want to capture in a dvd compliant format, you need to capture as mpeg-2 - but with a low-end capture card, you may not get as good quality as going the other way.

Of course, this gets into the quality vs. time & effort argument - on some video where I'm not as concerned with quality (or the source is already compromised and I'm not worried about making it better) I'll capture direct to mpeg-2 just for convienience sake.

[TheInformer]

I had always used VirtualDub to capture analog video @ 352x480 and have never had any problems in the past.

Most all of my capturing now though is done through my Sony DVMC-DA1 analog<-->DV converter.

[txpharoah]

I think Txpharoah is suggesting that with the technical specs of the mentioned capture device, it will look better if you went the long way around, capturing to avi and converting after the fact, instead of capturing direct - not that you can capture an avi and author it directly to dvd.

Yes, that's what I was suggesting.

But just to play devil's advocate, you COULD take the AVI's and use DVDit! and let DVDit! convert the AVI to MPEG2 and author all at once. I don't suggest this.

Or you COULD use PowerVCRII with several registry hacks (adding resolutions and re-interlacing) to get okay MPEG2 files. But just okay, not DVD, just better than VCD/XVCD and VHS.

Best option, for top quality, is to grab AVI (either RAW, Huffy or MJPEG) and convert to MPEG2 with something else.

Just be aware all these programs I mentioned cost money. Only VirtualDub is free. To convert/capture to MPEG2, you'll HAVE to spend some cash. Maybe you'll get lucky, and some of this came with your system or card.

[Atmos]

Regarding last part of your question, I find the codec installed in XP by Start, Control Panel, Sound and Audio Devices,Hardware tab, Video Codec (or Audio Codec), Properties and they are listed accurately for what I know I have installed.

[Ego_Shredder]

I have used LOADS of capture programs and here are the ones I have settled upon:

(1) AVI_IO - easy to setup and use and is well regarded because it loses very few frames due to the way it captures.

(2) Virtual Dub - superb and free! This is highly specified and can do just about anything.

(3) FreeVCR - great program and free. Is slightly less stable and reliable than AVI_IO and tends to lose more frames. It's still a very good program though.


Ego

[FOO]

I guess I'm finally going to have to ask about this.
People constantly tell me they capture with Vdub
but every time I try it it just drops vast amounts of frames.

I too have tried every capture app ever mentioned on these forums
and they all seem to have a highr bandwidth than Vdub

I capture at 720 x 480 with PicVideo Mjpeg so that
TMPGenc won't have to resize and CCE (which can't) works directly

Sometimes I do 640 x 480 or 480 x 480 and that still has problems
Is there something I don't know ?

[snowmoon]

Have you fooled with the disk buffers?

I have switched from Vdub to VirtualVCR since it resamples the audio and has droped my frame loss from 15/hr to 0. I only do TV caps. It's a smart move to try other capture software since VFW drivers are seriously depreciated and ahrd to find for newer cap cards.

[FOO]

I think I did once.


Note that Vdub does not support the WDM interface and
ATI does not have a VFW driver.
so the famous "WDM wrapper" must be used to translate
the VFW interface for Vdub.
I have heard rumors that this incurs a good deal of overhead.

I can capture at 8000K/s with the ATI stuff with no drops
720 x 480

[snowmoon]

MJPEG 720x480 is at least twice that bitrate. 1 minute at 8000 is ~60MB 1 minute of MJPEG is much larger. So this could still be an issue.

I would avoid the wrapper because it just seems like a cludge in the long run. Since there are other non-cludge options I would exhaust them first before resorting to the wrapper method.

[RoopeT]

Best capture app: VirtualDub VCR Synch (a modified version of VDub including better audio synching and a timer for captures)

[RoopeT]

People constantly tell me they capture with Vdub
but every time I try it it just drops vast amounts of frames.

Capture audio uncompressed. Use YUV2 colorspace. Turn off preview and overlay. In VDub synch version use dynamic audio sampling rate.