I know quality is in the eye of the beholder. What I call quality is when I play a TV cap for someone, they would not ask me if it was a recording...or why it was so fuzzy.

I'm trying to cap .avi from dish network to PC. My goal is to get as close to original broadcast quality as possible. Currently the .avi caps look somewhat fuzzy - and this seems strange to me, since my VHS caps are perfect. I'm converting to DVD, and the mpeg2 files are just as fuzzy.

Crap in = crap out

However the dish network source looks fine while watching the preview on the monitor. It's only when I play it back (PC or TV) that I notice just how much the quality has dropped off. I'm going in by ?composite? right off the dish box.

I 've eliminated the cables as an issue, because I use these same cables on VHS caps and they work fine. (Just backed up the original Blade Runner VHS - not director's cut - made a beautiful copy.) That was using MJPEG at 20 (Which works fine on the VHS.). So I switched to Huffyuv and ran fast tests last night. It looks so much better, that I have hopes this may have solved the problem - but it may have been cause I was staring at the poor caps for so long that anything would have looked better at the moment. My 'real' tests are being done now - by timer - I'm at work. So I won't know what's up until I'm home.

I tried caps of 720 x 480, and 640 x 480. No real difference. Is this a waste of resolution / PC resources for dish network caps? I'll be saving them as half D1...but that's another thread.

I'm using Virtual VCR, which seems to cap better than avi_io for me. Had serious issues getting Viirtual dub to capture, so I only use it for editing/filtering.

Why would one codec perform so well on VHS caps but be avg on TV caps?

Are there any other settings, codecs, suggestions to consider while solving this?

Quick specs: Winfast 2000xp dlx, WinXP pro, 768 meg ram, 2 80 gig 7200 rpm HD's, 1800+ cpu.