What Codec do you use for your Captures?

[willy_annand]

I use MPEG 2. I capture from satellite dish and VHS tape's and Laserdisc. I Use ATI AIW 8.1 and I also use a Dazzle 2. I use the software that it come's with

Can you get "Good" quality going directly to MPEG?

I tried it with both my ASUS v7700 card and my Winnov Videum 1000+ and going directly to MPEG2 in real time gave very very poor quality compared to capping with Huffy and letting TMPGEnc take it's time converting to MPEG2.

I am doing Video to DVD conversions as part of my companies services, so I want quality. TMPGEnc gives great quality, looks better than the original most times (thanks to filtering) but takes about 8 hours per hour of video. So I am limited to doing only 2 hours per day.

[willy_annand]

...Do you have virtualdub installed. If you click on video, compression you should see it along with your other video codecs if it is instaled properly.

VirtualDub cannot find my MSI TV@nywhere, says no capturing device!

As far as I know, VirtualDub only supports VFW devices, if the drivers for your MSI card are the newer WDM format, it may not find it.

[housepig]

housepig wrote:

Huffy all the way...

100% agreement here Housepig.

The quality cannot be beat.

I might be a heretic now, though... I just got the Picvideo MJPEG codec, and I'm checking it out... for some of the stuff I'm doing right now (20+ year old Beta tapes on a 20 year old Beta deck) MJPEG is giving me comparable quality at about 1/3 to 1/4 the file size of Huffy.

so this will allow me to capture 10 hours instead of 2 1/2 before I fill my main capture drive... gotta do it. (unless I start seeing sync problems in my test capture I'm running right now).

[mrtristan]

I use huffyuv with iuvcr. I've used picvideo's mjpeg from time to time, but I prefer the quality of huffyuv.

Back when I could use Virtualdub to capture, I enabled noise reduction with huffyuv and got about a 2.8 compression ratio.

[Conquest10]

I use huffyuv with iuvcr.

same here. i love the quality but i can only do about an hour and a half before i got to do some cleaning up. i might try out that Picvideo MJPEG codec.

[SatStorm]

Huffyuv is the top when you capture - encode (2 steps). If you add filters, then the quality benefits of this amazing freeware codec are wasted.

IMHO always

[DrWafer]

1 min with huffyuv makes a file of 650mbytes,too much,i cannot take it,
sorry but i use PICvideo
with iuVCR.

and i cannot understand why most of you are sticked up with virtualdub?

my card doesnt support high resolutions and with higher than 352x288 virtualdub doesnt work,on the contrary with iuVCR and the same card i can
capture at 768x576 with any codec and exceptional quality,
another thing is that with virtualdub you have to fix AGAIN all settings every time you need to capture.

virtualdub was a fine software but this is for past.

[Poplar]

Huffy most of the times, uncompressed ocassionally. Don't want to compromise quality.

[housepig]

and i cannot understand why most of you are sticked up with virtualdub?

because it's good software, with a deep feature set, it's free, and for lots of people will work really well and do what they want.

those of us who have capture cards that don't work with Virtualdub have to find something else. But if I could use Vdub with my card, I would. I use it all the time for vid editing.

[feenix]

I guess I'm way in the minority here but I capture with Xvid (VirtualVCR, 640x480 ,1 pass quality at 95%) with no frame drops and no sync problems. A 2 hour movie is comfortably under 4Gb (which is the limit on my system as it doesn't segment like AV_IO or VirtualDub). I capture the audio uncompressed and if I decide I want to keep the movie then I convert the audio (using Audacity) to MP3 and just do a quick remux using Vdub-MP3 version direct stream copy on both audio and video

Ideal for watching on a 4:3 TV and the quality is equitable to MPEG2 or MJPEG

This also lends itself very well to convert to VCD using tmpenc (I've also played around with DVD using Mainconcept and it converted in .7 of realtime). The quality is fine , although I could understand if some people thought that going from 640x480 to 720x576 is not acceptable

[Conquest10]

i love virtualdub. i use it to edit then frameserve my captures. but i too cannot cap any higher than 288 vertical resolution and even at that drops TONS of frames. iuvcr caps at 720x480 with 0 dropped frames. other than that, virtualdub is great.

[K2]

MPEG2

[mrtristan]

I hear you. I've tried everything and then some to get it to work on my newer computer, but it just ain't happening. I isolated the problem to the VFW wrapper, but I haven't found a "fixed" version of it.

Even if I capture at 320X240, my system will drop frames randomly. What I liked best about capturing with Virtualdub was the on the fly noise reduction. Iuvcr works like a charm, but I can't find a noise reduction filter to use while capturing. It's supposed to be pretty easy to author a Directshow filter to use with iuvcr, so I'm surprised that someone hasn't already done so. If there is a filter out there, I guess I just haven't looked hard enough yet.

Anyway, PICvideo's mjpeg codec works perfectly with iuvcr. I haven't had any problems with it so far. In fact, I might start using it again, since I'm running out of hard drive space for captures that are waiting to be converted.

i love virtualdub. i use it to edit then frameserve my captures. but i too cannot cap any higher than 288 vertical resolution and even at that drops TONS of frames. iuvcr caps at 720x480 with 0 dropped frames. other than that, virtualdub is great.

[willy_annand]

i love virtualdub. i use it to edit then frameserve my captures. but i too cannot cap any higher than 288 vertical resolution and even at that drops TONS of frames. iuvcr caps at 720x480 with 0 dropped frames. other than that, virtualdub is great.

Give AVI_IO a try, automatically splits capture into either 2GB or 4GB files, allows capture over multiple HDs, simple to use and excellent quality results.

[dcsos]

DV with my DV captures

or MJPEG by TARGA for semi-uncompressed analog AVI

[fmctm1sw]

If capping 352 x 240... huffyuv
If capping XXX x 480... Picvideo @19

[housepig]

I may be a convert...

the Picvideo MJPEG performed just as well as Huffy, image quality-wise, on the grungy sources I'm capturing from right now... with the added bonus of smaller file size, zero dropped frames (Huffy I get about 6-8 dropped frames per hour, nothing to cry about) and faster encode times.

It remains to be seen when I go back over to Laserdisc source if MJPEG will hold up, but for now, I'm liking it...

[mrtristan]

housepig - From my experience, the difference in quality is very minor. At full quality, I can barely tell the difference in the final encode. That might even be due to the fact that I know what material used each coded. I only use huffyuv, because I'm a perfectionist. I've been working on a combination of noise reduction and sharpening on the same captures for over a year and I'm still not satisfied.

[housepig]

mrtristan:

I'm not a perfectionist - I'm just trying to move stuff onto dvd for ease of use, and to stop degradation (or at least slow it down!).

and a lot of the stuff that I'm copying, I'll never get amazing quality, because the original isn't amazing quality - it's a dub of a dub of a dub - so it's looking like I'm going to save Huffy for the stuff that has the best chance to respond to it, and MJPEG for the general archive stuff... I ran some test footage past my quality judging crew, and they couldn't see any real difference.