minidv capture straight to mpeg?

[onetrueday]

curious if it's possible?

I have a lot of vhs tapes I'll be doing for myself. not extremely concerned with quality.

can you capture off of a miniDV and go straight to mpeg for dvd authoring?

thanks

tom

[i_am_dave]

Tom,
There are many video software packages that do an on-the-fly conversion to MPEG. I suggest you look in the tools section and find one that is right for you. But..... there are a few things to consider.
1) Your computer must be powerful enough to handle the encoding while it is capturing from the camera, else you will get dropped frames.
2) Most of these pictures use very fast algorithms to convert, at the expense of quality. You must decide if this is acceptable to you.

The only reason I can see that anyone would want to do what you are talking about is if disk space is limited. Is this an issue with you?
If not, I would suggest capturing in DV and using a tool like TMPGEnc to encode later.
Also, since your source material is VHS, I would suggest encoding in Half-D1 format (352x480). It will allow you to put more content on your DVD since the resulting MPEG file will be smaller.

[onetrueday]

I'm still shooting blanks here...

I'm finding all-in-one solutions, but not an on-the-fly method.

thanks

[FOO]

Somebody reported that Mainconcept 1.4 will capture and
convert to MPEG2 on the fly

Get a ATI AIW. I capture TV movies all the time to MPEG2 at 5000K b/s

Hauppage does it in hardware

[i_am_dave]

Ulead Video Studio will also do on the fly

[BJ_M]

yes ulead and main concept will do on the fly dv to mpeg2 encoding ....

mainconcept will do any type of compression you have installed from dv -- i tried it for the first time yesterday and worked really well (dv to mpeg2 )..

ulead will offer you further editing capibilities of course ...

[i_am_dave]

ulead will offer you further editing capibilities of course ...

And it is relatively cheap . That is if you buy Video Studio instead of the Media package.

[ozdemir23]

How about this? I have backed up my vacation from the Sony MiniDV recorder using Windows Movie Maker (cause it was really easy). Now, I am finding that when i try to save it to a CDr that it only writes it in some new format (can't remember and can't find it on their site). Apparently it only is supported by Windows Media player 9 and some dvd players are beginning to support it as well (like panasonic). I want to know how I can just make a simple VCD with this backed up data. Is it possible? I just backed up my entire vacation and used some of the tapes that i originally backed up so i can't redo it with a new program. thanks much

oz