Couple of lame questions, plz help.

[Ardmanz]

Hey,

Ok,

1. Ive been capturing stuff for quite a while. I capture from my sky (digital) with a wintv.
Anyway I always used an rf cable and a seperate stereo lead. Up till recently the picture quality has always been ok. But I have recently had to get a new set top box and the picture qualitys gone to the craps. So I wanted to use a composite or an s-video lead. The box itself has no obvious outputs to suggest either of these would be compatible. What I was thinking is I have a scart output. I also have a scart connecter that accepts audio and video cables seperatly. Could an s-video or composite lead be plugged in to the video socket of this?

2. When playing the sound through on my comp (from tv) its perfect quality. But when I try to capture the sound looses quality and becomes a bit tinny, also if I capture the sound to loud it becomes very distorted so the caputured sound level is very low. (I am using 16bits 44khz for the sound settings). How can I over come this.

I am using virtual dub to capture btw.

Thanks a lot for reading and any help.

[Ardmanz]

^bump^?

[Hitmandj]

I see when u plug your new box to the card that quailty has gone crap, if so re tune the channels the crap quailty could be casued due to differnt signals or frequency.

by

[Dave B]

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1. Ive been capturing stuff for quite a while. I capture from my sky (digital) with a wintv.
Anyway I always used an rf cable and a seperate stereo lead. Up till recently the picture quality has always been ok. But I have recently had to get a new set top box and the picture qualitys gone to the craps. So I wanted to use a composite or an s-video lead. The box itself has no obvious outputs to suggest either of these would be compatible. What I was thinking is I have a scart output. I also have a scart connecter that accepts audio and video cables seperatly. Could an s-video or composite lead be plugged in to the video socket of this?
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The SCART specification allows both Composite and S-Video (as well as RGB) to be passed through it. Hence you will be able to find the correct leads at Maplin http://www.maplin.co.uk to provide a Scart output and a composite RCA and Stereo jack plug. S-Video would be OK too but Sky digiboxs do not (I think) support S-Video output. I run my TV at home upstairs via Scart - passing a composite video and stereo audio signal.
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2. When playing the sound through on my comp (from tv) its perfect quality. But when I try to capture the sound looses quality and becomes a bit tinny, also if I capture the sound to loud it becomes very distorted so the caputured sound level is very low. (I am using 16bits 44khz for the sound settings). How can I over come this.
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As long as you are selecting a high enough quality in your recording settings, you should not be able to hear any reduction in quality from the recorded sound. The fact that you do suggests that you need a sound card driver update. I experienced a similar problem with a VIA on-board soundcard. It captured sound perfectly in Win2000 but distorted it in WinME - New ME drivers (downloaded from viatech.com) fixed this problem.

I would however first check that it is not just a problem with Virtualdub audio capture and try a capture with Windows Sound Recorder.