Do you have so-so cable reception?
Do you use an ATI as you capture device?
Do you want good looking VCD’s to keep or watch?
Do you want to cut commercials and not have to figure out a way to join 5 separate MPEG files afterwards (with no audio sync problems)?

That was my dilemma...

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If you’re in my situation this will be helpful to you.

I record a lot of shows off of cable TV - my cable feed leaves something to be desired. The reception is best described as “so-so” – so I have some noise in all my captures that I just can’t avoid.

I like to record a lot of TV shows – edit out the commercials and then watch them the next day or keep them in a library (like my collection of Seinfeld episodes)

I used to use my ATI AIW to capture directly to VCD compliant but the quality really wasn’t there so I experimented with a host of other settings. My computer isn’t the fastest and any resolution above 352x240 would cause me to drop frames. Almost any setting using MPEG-2 caused me to lose frames and capturing with VirtualDub with a lossless codec works nice but I don’t have that much SPACE.

I finally settled in with a capture solution for me that yields very good quality MPEG-1 VCD compliant captures.

What you will need is VirutalDub, MMC 7.1 and Panasonic MPEG-1 encoder 2.5.

To capture I use ATI’s MMC 7.1 set at 352x240 MPEG-1 with a bitrate of 3.0 CBR (the advantage of 3.0 bitrate is that it will give you 3 hours of recording on 2.5 gig of hd space).

I use the MMC Reg Tool to set my bitrate to exactly 3.0

Once you’re done with recording drag your MPEG-1 capture into VirtualDub. Using the “mark in” and “mark out” functions of VirtualDub cut out all the commercials. There is no audio delay with this method and I have never had audio out of sync problems.

Now start the VirtualDub framserver. Save the file with an .avi extension not the .vdf the program suggests.

Open the Panasonic MPEG encoder – load the avi. Set type to VCD/NTSC and under Advanced Settings set Noise Reduction to “Strong”. Then start encoding.

This will produce a NTSC VCD standard MPEG that is commercial free and looks better than the original capture.

I find this method faster than using TMPGEnc – being a big fan of TMPGEnc I’m not putting it down in any way but for this method Panasonic is faster (especially when doing noise reduction!!!) and results in less block noise during fast motion scenes. An hour show with the commercials cut out on my PIII 450 only takes slightly over 2 hours.

I hope that helps someone!

-Stinky