Why can I only capture 1 hour of video?

[harjo02]

I've got a PCTV analog capture card and it won't capture any more than 1 hour of analog video. I can't find any information on why this might be an issue. I'm capturing in DVD quality (I know its a waste on capturing analog), ~30fps and the final file is only 316M. I've got more than enough hard disk space (two 60G in RAID).

I saw a post in another forum that said to check the Capture | Stop condition but I don't see that as an option. Does PCTV have a hard wired default to only capture 1 hour? Am I missing something? I'm a newbie so I'm not only struggling to understand it but its got me frustrated as hell. I can't back up any of my VHS movies, etc....

Any thoughts??

[Forum Troll]

Does that prog let you specify which codec is used to compress the video? I would recommend HuffyUV, a free lossless AVI compression codec.

[fmctm1sw]

One hour capture of full D1 at 30 fps? That doesn't add up to 316MB. You are stopping way before 1 hour (like immediatley). Look more into that....

[Will Hay]

When you say you're capturing in full DVD quality, what do you mean exactly?
If you're capturing VHS via anaolgue then in any event you're right, IMO it's a complete waste.
I capture full DV (I have to, I have the Canopus ADVC-100) but encode at 352 x 576, 25fps, generally at 4000CBR and I can't distinguish them from the source.
Will

[harjo02]

The Pinnacle card doesn't give me a whole lot of options except in capture quality. I can change the compression, bit rate, and size but not the codec. In my hardware profile under my video capture device, I see a bunch of *.dll and the Ligos Indeo Video 5.11 and Microsoft MPEG-4 Video Codec.

To answer your question, I was capturing in MPEG2 compression, 9.50Mb/s bit rate (I knew it was overkill but I wanted to experiment), and 720x480. Pinnacle has crap for support and I'm pissed because half the reason I got this card was to back up my VHS tapes and I don't feel much like cropping together 1 hour VHS captures.

See below:

[Will Hay]

Ah-ha, so you're capturing directly to mpeg2 eh?
Need a great system for that, as well as a super-dooper capture card.
My suggestion would be to try Virtualdub with the free huffyuv codec, capture to avi and then encode to mpeg2 using the 30 trial of TMPGEnc Plus.
See what results you get.
If you succeed I'm sure your capture quality would improve.
Oh, and capture at 352 x (whatever this might be, in my case 540), rather than 720 x (whatever), I still mantain anything more with VHS tapes is overkill.
You might also want to try the PicVideo MJPEG codec. It's not free but prior to getting the ADVC-100 I used it all the time (quality setting 19 of 20, 20/20 IMO is overkill), I found the huffyuv codec too CPU intensive.
Will
Will

[harjo02]

Will Hay:

I sincerely appreciate your input but I'm not sure it directly answers my question. My quality isn't too bad. I've got a pretty good rig so I don't suffer from the capture. My biggest problem is that it records for 1 hour and then stops. The PCTV capture card only allows me to record in 1 hour increments, which is a big pain in the pole when backing up VHS.

Thanks again for the feedback!

[Will Hay]

Will Hay:

I sincerely appreciate your input but I'm not sure it directly answers my question. My quality isn't too bad. I've got a pretty good rig so I don't suffer from the capture. My biggest problem is that it records for 1 hour and then stops. The PCTV capture card only allows me to record in 1 hour increments, which is a big pain in the pole when backing up VHS.

Thanks again for the feedback!

I see, I didn't know you were completely happy with the quality, you didn't say so.
Have you tried the default setting for mpeg2 capture (rather than custom)?
316mb for one hour of capture in mpeg2 just doesn't add up.
Good luck with a solution
Will

[TTE]

There are some useful suggestions here though, such as capturing using VirtualDub as an avi and seeing whether you can get over an hour that way.
This is probably a stupid suggestion, but the only time I have found Pinnacle limiting my capture time was when I was trying out an external hard drive which was FAT32 formatted and was thus limited to 2Gb for each file. Although you mention that the file is 300-odd Mb, an hour of DVD quality MPEG2 should be about 2Gb.
Anyway, good luck with it.....