Poor Quality Captures - Advice Needed

[marcus2704]

My set up is -

P4 2.6
NVIDEA GeForce FX 5600 W/ VIVO
1024 DDR Ram

I am trying to capture from a SKy Plus Digital box. I connect my GeForce card via SVideo, and use iuVCR as my captrue software. However the results are rather poor. Whilst the preview appears to be ok, once played back, the uncompressed video is poor quality with lines in like so -



I am in the UK, and have selected the PAL option within iuVCR, and 29fps.

I am concerned that the card I bought is a poor choice as I would expect much better results than this. Someone mentioned the ATI All-in-Wonder card would of been a better bet, whilst another person advised I should invest in an amplifier to increase the signal strength.

If anyone can offer any guidance as to how I can improve my captures I would appreciate it.

Regards

[FOO]

Looks like every other field is black and it was de-interlaced.
Of course I dunno how you got that still picture.

Why do you capture at NTSC frame rate ?
PAL is 25 fps.

Try the capture at 352 x 576 interlaced 25 fps

[marcus2704]

Thanks, using 704x576, 25fps I noticed a definite improvement so I am moving in the right direction at least. There are however still times where the image distorts particularly on fast moving scenes, seeing as how badly I configured iuVCR above Im sure there are probably other settings I have chosen incorrectly, like PAL_D Video Standard for example. Can anyone recommend settings to help me get the best out of iuVCR?

[Richard_G]

For the UK PAL system you want PAL-I, 25 fps. You can capture in numerous resolutions although your best bets are 720 x 576 (Full DVD resolution or D1) or 352 x 576 (Half D1). You won't notice any difference in quality as half D1 at 3000kbs is about what Sky transmit in the first place. You will notice that you don't gobble up disk space as quick though.

You will always see some interlacing effects when viewing on a pc, if you burn the resulting video to DVD or VCD and play it back on a TV you won't. The TV wants an interlaced signal, the pc doesn't.

[marcus2704]

Thanks for that advice, I have made the adjustments as recommended, and it does look a lot better now.

Ive got the large uncompressed AVI file which I now need to convert to a reasonable sized SVCD. However, when its uncompressed its viewable perfectly fine when using WMP of Power DVD, upon loading and selecting the SVCD (PAL) temlate .mcf file, TMPGEnc displays a B&W distorted image as follows (apologies for the pictures, its the easist way to explain..) -



Thanks in advance once again,