Pinnacle DC30 Mjpeg capture Advice!!

[TechieMan]

Hi All,

I just want to transfer some VHS tapes to DVD and wanted to know if using the RCA video in 5Mb data rate is enough. Has anyone used similar data rate? would I benefit increasing the data rate? I cannot check the quality on the TV as I need to capture and transfer first!

The reason I ask is, I don't want to start dropping frames but would like to keep maximum quality. I am dropping some frames but thats just bad VHS so the sooner I transfer to digital the better.

I am using the Pinnacle Mjpeg codec. I cannot capture via SVHS as its giving me a black and white picture.

Any advice offered would be greatly appreciated!!

[Piccoro]

When I used this card a while back, I think I used 4mb setting at 640x480.
It was used on a slower PC and droped frames at >5-6mb and once in a while at 5mb. That was my setup, but you may beable to go higher, test capture for over an hour if you have space. Quality was acceptable for me but could have been better. This venture was in my early days.

[TechieMan]

Thanks for replying Piccoro

Well I captured an hour of video last night and had about 150 dropped frames but about 100 of them were due to interference in the VHS recording and often if the VHS video flickers then it loses some frames.

I would really like to know is, is 5 Meg data rate enough? For me to then encode 720X576 Mpeg 2 DVD format with CCE or TMPGenc.

As I have not encoded and tested on a TV set I don't know what sort of results it will produce. Thus I posted here to see if anyone has captured at 5 Meg and if the quality is as good as the source. I'll try 6 Meg to see how that goes.

[TechieMan]

I have managed to capture with a data rate of 6 Meg, I only drop frames where the video is bad...jerky etc.

I captured 1 hour and the AVI size is 25 GIG!!!!

I am trying to split the AVI so I can edit with Premiere but I am getting major A/V sync with VirtualDub.

I am using direct stream copy...I have tried ripping sound first and tried it that way...but still no luck.

Can someone advice on the use of VirtualDub...and I have tried some other apps but they don't like the huge file size.

Thanks

[TechieMan]

I could really do with some info on the A/V sync issue....

Thanks

[D_Knife]

I did this a while ago - I don't have the DC30 anymore
when you open the file in VirtualDub - use the open file menu option (ie don't drag and drop) and choose popup extended open options - then open your file
choose the option to use internal MJPEG decoder
this should fix your sync issues - it should also be slightly faster since the DC30 (at least on my drivers) only offered hardware decompression under certain condidtions most of them using old 16bit MCI calls
Without it the driver resorts to software playback and it's not optimised at all.