MPeg4 Capture

[mkaylor]

I'm in need of a HW/SW package to capture video from a camera for 8 hours a day in MPeg4 format. I need a capture device that supports software that would allow me to setup a start and stop time without human intervention.

The Fast Movie Maker USB seems to have good reviews but I'm not sure about getting software to talk with it for what I need.

Most of the Windows PVR software can be setup with start and stop times but I'm not sure they would work with a capture device that's not a tv tuner and is USB.

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

Mike

[Abbadon]

Hi,

I have not used this device myself, you need a computer to "talk to it" and store the video.

http://www.plextor.com/english/products/ConvertX.html

[linux-works]

I have that, for now (still in 30day eval period).

not sure if I'm going to keep it. its being compared to a canopus (that costs 4x as much) and an adaptec that was around the same price.

drivers - that's my main complaint. no hardware abstraction among brands. any old DV can connect to DV. and any old capture program that works with dv will work with your dv box or camera. but not so with the plextor and its ilk. a big down-side, I think.

I'm not sure I'm super happy with the vid quality of the plextor in mp4 or divx mode. I am also testing out that infamous philips 642 home dvd/divx player. and so far, I can't see divx even coming close to a proper dvd/mpeg encode. at least not yet, maybe I'm doing something wrong or setting something incorrectly.

finally, on the convert-x, I was not able to bring its quality UP. I could compress quite a bit, but I could not fit a whole hour of content and make it 'spread' across a single layer dvd-r. ie, there seemed to be no 'full quality' mode in the plextor encoder box - only 'tight' and 'tightest' fwiw.

[Abbadon]

I had plans to purchase that piece of crap, but I decided I will wait till some genius design a true PCI hardware DivX encoder or who knows, an AGP card?

The plextor does not allow the use of a third party software to load a raw capture and compress ( stupid morons ).

Thanks for the review linux-works

[Manokat]

I have a Plextor MX 402U. So far I am happy with the quality of both MPEG2 and DIVX/MPEG4 it captures. I do not think it is a piece of crap.

The Home Theater preset of Divx capture, which is the best quality, can capture for 1 hour with the size of 2.9G. This will fit on one dvdr and the quality is great. The second preset which is Home Theater (LP) can capture 1 hour with the size of 1.02G. With VirtualDub you can open the divx files and resave them. For some reason VirtualDUB can recompress the file to smaller size without a noticebale loss of quality. My guess is that most of hardware based chip does not have enough memory for buffering that is why encoding can only be done one pass as a result the file size can not be optimally compressed.

I use Lite-on LVD-2001 Divx player for playing back the divx files captured by Plextor M402U. I put 4 hours of divxs captured using home theater (LP) preset on one 4.7G dvdr media.