Another newbie. ATI AIW 128 - mpeg size way too big.

[scott478]

Please excuse my ignorance, I'm very new to this capturing stuff. I'm trying to capture home vhs movies of my daughter. The one I'm trying to do now is 45 minutes long. The capturing works fine but the size of the resulting file (mpeg-1) is about 2 gigs. Way to big (obviously) to fit on a cd. The 2 gigs I'm getting is with it set on the "longest" setting, which I'm assuming would be the lowest quality setting, but still way to big. I need it to be roughly 600mb. Is it possible? From everything I've read in this forum, it should be no problem to get this thing down to the size I need, but I have no idea how to do it and keep the best quality.
Is anyone here familiar with the ATI AIW 128 card?
What would be the proper settings for this card?
Any and all help would be greatly appreciated.

Scott

[reficul]

i have the ATI AIW 128 card as well. i prefer to capture with Virtual Dub using the huffyuv codec (see the tools section) to an avi file which i then encode to VCD or SVCD. you can read the details in the how to capture and how to convert sections. i use this method for my old home video and i'm very satisfied with the results.

[kingoflubrication]

how many minutes is the video file you are capturing. if it is not that long and its 2 gigs chances are you are capturing the file as an uncompressed avi not an mpeg. uncompressed avi video files will give you the best video quality, but you have to convert it to an mpeg or mpeg2 file if you want to put it on a vcd or svcd. click the "tools" link on the sidebar of this site, it will show you where to find some good mpeg converters. i use tmpgenc, which i really like. by the way, i dont have an ati or any other capture card, but from what i have read on this site it is best to capture as an uncompressed avi then convert to mpeg, and not capture in realtime to mpeg format; you will preserve quality this way.

[scott478]

Thanks to you both for the replies.
reficul,
I'm looking into the Virtual Dub now.

kingoflubrication,
The video that I'm capturing is the exact same length (45min, 46secs) as the original.
I was capturing in real time to mpeg-1
As far as I can see, there is no option in the program that came with the card to save as an avi file.
Here are the file format options that I'm given:

ATI Packed YUV Data
YUY2 Packed Data
YVU9 Planer (Indeo Raw)
YVU12 Planer (MPEG Raw)
ATI VCR 1.0
ATI VCR 2.0
MPEG-1
MPEG-2

I'm becoming familiar with the mpeg1 and mpeg2 but the other ones are way over my head

Thanks again for the help!

Scott

[cifcap]

Scott,

I too have the ATI AIW 128 (16mb) and the CODEC that I prefer to use is the ATIVCR1 CODEC. It offers very little compression (a must for my system is far from top of the line), and the quality is excellent. This codec will allow you to create an .AVI file that can be encoded to either MPEG 1 or 2. The resulting .AVI will be far from small (I like capturing at 720x480), but with a good (software)MPEG encoder the end result is pretty good. I, like you, am not an expert, but that's what works for me.

Cifcap