Software for capturing interlaced?

[JamesB69]

Heres the deal, I have less than 20GB to capture 2 hours to, so I need to stick to software MPEG compression. I am using a Leadtek 2000XP Expert, and find the Winfast PVR software to be really, really bad in both performance and capture quality.

The performance of WinDVR 3 is good, but I would rather capture Interlaced (plan on IVTC later), and WinDVR seems to not have the option. Since I am stuck at 1.5ghz, what software that captures interlaced MPEG should give the highest performance?

[lordsmurf]

MainConcept 1.4 ... maybe.
PowerVCR II 3.0 with interlace hacks.
Guides at www.digitalFAQ.com

[JamesB69]

is that it? I just tried the trial of Powervcr and I dont like being stuck with mpeg audio...

WinDVR was nice since it could encode AC3 on the fly, but I like to capture PCM since I will be encoding to AC3 anyways....

So there is basically no program that will allow on the fly MPEG capture (interlaced), and PCM audio?

I dont believe this...

[lchiu7]

If you don't mind an additional step, you could capture in MJPEG format. I think a 1.5GHz machine could handle that without dropping frames. Using a setting pf say 15-16 on the Picvideo codec, you would end up taking up 5-6G/hour with PCM audio 48Khz 16 bits. Then you could edit that or convert to MPEG2 later

There are many programs that can could do that including VirtualVCR, IUVCR, maybe Virtualdub

Larry

[JamesB69]

I tried the MJPEG thing using Winfast PVR, and the one that was already there was pretty slow. I then did a google and got the trial of Picvideo MJPEG and it is pretty impressive results at 5GB per hour (Quality setting of 17)...

In case anybody else is wondering, I finally found software that can do what I want. I got the trial of ChrisTV and it uses the Intervideo Video Encoder and Audio Encoder from WinDVR, but it capture Interlaced! I was able to capture interlaced mpeg with AC3!

Anyways, it has several other awesome features too, but CPU usage seems to be a little high and I dont really like the GUI that much.

Seeing as how the WinDVR codec CAN capture interlaced, there must be some hack to make WinDVR do it.. Any ideas?

[JamesB69]

well, just another update. Turns out using ChrisTV, with the intervideo encoder, the files it outputs are progressive, but not de-interlaced...

They are progressive images, but you can clearly see interlace lines. I used Restream and changed the type to interlaced and they now appear to play back properly, but in editors you can clearly tell its interlaced.

I do not know whether it is ChrisTV or the codec's fault for the MPEG's being mistakenly flagged as progressive. I did find that the Intervideo encoder has a configuration dialog that has the choices "Automatic, Progressive, or Interlaced" but have not found any MPEG capturing applications that will let me use the codec and get to the dialog....

Also, ChrisTV is not capturing AC3 as I had thought, it was captuing MPEG audio. Does anybody know of any way to capture AC3 with anything other than WinDVR?

[FulciLives]

If you really intend to do a lot of "post processing" like doing an IVTC or a "video noise" filter etc. then you really should just capture in an AVI format using a codec like HuffyUV or PICVideo MJPEG (although here I would suggest using the 20 out of 20 setting or at the very least the 19 out of 20 setting).

If you intend to do an IVTC then you have to re-encode to MPEG-2 so there is no point to do the capture in MPEG-2.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[Chris25]

I use Uleads Video Studio 7 to capture. It allows you to capture a progressive or interlaced picture, and choose between mpa or pcm audio...... Hope this helps......

[JamesB69]

I the PICVideo MJPEG at quality 17 worth it or would a MPEG-2 be better?

I plan on doing an IVTC and re-encode to 352x480...