MJPEG format

[roglopes]

Dear friends.
What's the disadvantage (prejudice, handicap, drawback, inconvenience) when I capture in MJPEG format?
I'm have Pixelview PlayTV HD, and burn VCD, SVCD and DVD.
I capture in MJPEG, after I convert to MPEG1 or MPEG2.
When I capture in MJPEG I observe that the brightness stays more blank.
What's the disadvantage (prejudice, handicap, drawback, inconvenience) of the MJPEG format?
Thanks and sorry about my bad english.

[Zetti]

If you're unsure, try the HuffYUV codec, which is lossless and creates not so big files;

If you don't have room and wanna make decent stuff, it's worthy to drop some money on a 160 GB HD;

Zetti

[redwudz]

Capturing in a format that gives you the least compression is usually the best. Then encode to MPG format. This allows you to fine tune your MPG compression to get the best quality. If quality is not your primary concern, then capture (or convert) directly to MPG. This will save time and a lot of drive space at the expense of quality. That being said, if your capture is from a local TV channel, you are probably better off going straight to MPG. But if you have a high quality signal and you want the best end quality, capture to AVI with Huffy as mentioned, second best (IMO) PicVideo, and use an MPG encoder like TMPGEnc to encode for best quality. Have lots of room for Huffy, though, it eats up drive space. A side benefit of AVI capture is that though large, is easier to edit than MPG.

[vcd4ever]

What's the disadvantage (prejudice, handicap, drawback, inconvenience) of the MJPEG format?

The MJPEG format can sometimes produce very bad artifacts. I have read some technical post's about this problem and i have also experienced this problem myself.

vcd4ever.

[lchiu7]

I capture in mjpeg format (PicVideo) quality 18 using a Hauppauge WinTV PCI card and IUVCR. For an hour's show the file is about 10G. I then edit the file in Virtualdub to remove ads, deinterlace and resize (to get over overscan problems) and framserver to Mainconcept to get the MPEG2 file I need to author to DVD. This works pretty well. I have never had a problem with MJPEG using PicVideo but did have a few with Morgan's MJPEG codec.

I did try capturing using huffyuv and while it worked okay (no frame drops) 720x576 going to a 250G Maxtor as a master on the secondary IDE channel, it was harder to edit the file. With Premiere Pro if I opened that file up and then tried to cut the sections of program I wanted, I got strange distortions in the video plus the final output after encoding was not much different from starting from mjpeg.

Of course YMMV

[Will Hay]

All I wish to add is during my Matrox G400 and ATI Radeon period I only used the MJPEG PicVideo codec for a sustained amount of time (meaning others were tested and discarded) and for me nothing came close.
Will

[mickle]

I use MJPEG PicVideo codec all the time usually at quality 19, never gives me a scrap of trouble.

[lchiu7]

As a matter of interest some of the earlier Pinnacle capture cards did MJPEG in hardware. For example I have the DC10+ which I use to capture off cable TV. I find the quality excellent when using iuvcr as the capture program (for some reason Virtualdub complains of no capture device). Then I can convert to mpeg2 using Mainconcept (you do need to have a MJPEG codec loaded, I use PicVideo else you can't open the files except with Studio which is a bit poor).

Out of interest, mjpeg (from my undertanding is jpeg encoding on each frame). MPEG2 is similar except for enhanced compression because successive frames often only have the difference encoded etc. Should it be easier/faster to encode video from MJPEG format to MPEG2 than from raw AVI (or DV or huffyuv?)

[stackner]

after reading all this i am thinking what is wrong with my system?
intel p4 2.6g 160gig sata hdd 512mb ram

ive tried both huffy and picvideo mjpeg. they both give massive file size and that i can live with for good quality but at times with one i was getting worse than vhs quality captures and with the other i was getting out of sync audio video. i cannot remember which was which.

i decided to triel divx 5.0.2 corporate pro since no one has really mentioned divx. i capture at 720 x 576 x 25frames with divx set to 6000 - 9000 kbps and usually get no dropped frames for a 2 hour capture. sometimes maybe 1-6 frames dropped but for 2 hours i don't care. it uses 70 - 100% of the cpu but thats ok i dont use the pc while capturing and produces a file round 4-6gb for 2 hours compared to 100-160gb and then i encode to mpg-2 dvd using tmpgenc plus and have absolutely no problems and a btter end quality than huffy or picvideo mjpeg.

so why use one of those codecs that are going to fill your arddive if divx works better and produces a file for 2 hours no bigger than a standard dvd?