Capture cards hardware(and some software) questions

[junkmalle]

I'm NTSC capturing at 720 x 576 and encoding in CCE without any cropping in either prog.
Is it normal for it to not quite take up the entire screen? Anything I can do?

The problem is converting 720x576 (PAL resolution) to NTSC. Capture NTSC at 720x480.

[dreamking12]

Duh I'm so stupid, thanx junkmalle!

[dreamking12]

Hey thrasimacus you say you can cap straight to MPG2 with your ATI? I guess I have to use ATI MMC to do it? Right now I am capping with VDub and encoding with CCE, but am not doing any editing or filters.
If I could save some time and get the same results that would be great of course, could you please explain further? If you have tried my method will the quality be as good?

[ozymango]

I am capturing VHS.
Also let me ask, the picture and sound are great, however the resulting DVD's don't quite take up the full screen. Maybe a 1/4 border around the edge when played on TV.
I'm NTSC capturing at 720 x 576 ... Is it normal for it to not quite take up the entire screen? Anything I can do?

Um ... well, I see "NTSC" and "720 x 576" and I immediately think, aren't those resolution settings for PAL? I haven't actually tried capturing and converting at those settings myself so I can't be sure if that's the issue or not, but I suspect it could be your problem right there.

Somebody correct me if I'm wrong (and I'm sure somebody will correct me if I'm wrong!), but if you're in Oregon and you're watching TV here, you wanna be capturing at 720x480 -- your converter is somehow making your 720x576 captures "viewable" as NTSC but there's what, like 96 lines of "extra" resolution in there that is either getting cut off, or the converter is adding some proportional amount of lines to the width to make your aspect ration the same ... anyway, assuming this isn't just a simple overscan issue on your TV, try capturing at:

720x480
29.97fps

and see what that looks like. Good luck!

[dreamking12]

Yes ozymango, see above
Thanx anyways

[tluxon]

Hey thrasimacus you say you can cap straight to MPG2 with your ATI? I guess I have to use ATI MMC to do it? Right now I am capping with VDub and encoding with CCE, but am not doing any editing or filters.
If I could save some time and get the same results that would be great of course, could you please explain further? If you have tried my method will the quality be as good?

I'm not ghrasimacus, but I've captured mpeg-2 with my ATI (AIW 9600 Pro) without MMC using Ulead VideoStudio. The result was quite good, but I prefer MMC because of the extra control it provides.

Tim

[thrasimacus]

Interesting about not installing MMC and those patches working.
Yes, I use MMC because it is a great cap program, TV tuner program, and integrates scheduling etc. It makes use of all the capabilities of your AIW.

To be short. Yes. Caping with MMC will give you first class MPEG2's.
I guarantee you this.

Going VHS -to- Huffyuv (Vdub) -to- MPEG2 (software) will not give you
a better end product. Not one bit.

If you have the 9600 (I do too), I can tell you it will only use ~3% of cpu if you don't live filter the capture (called video soap). If you live filter the video, it will range on depending on number of filters applied. This can put a hurting on the CPU... so don't use videosoap. Sometimes it is cool to do a light intensity filter combo 1 on a TV signal with standard noise. It uses about ~10-20% cpu. No big deal.

Also if you use newer MMC's, the audio & video is always in sync. Unless due to some serious problems with the tape, you drop a lot of frames.

You should expect 0 frames lost with MMC 9.1. I is extremely rare to even loose 1 frame on a long capture. I hear huffyuv loses frames all the time and this is "ok". 3-8 frames per hour. Not sure how I feel about that. To me that is bad. So a strong CPU is needed for Huffyuv. This is OK. I am sure there are positive benefits to using huffyuv.

I did some tests and I must say, I don't SEE the benefit of using Huffyuv in the end MPEG2. None.

Now to be fair, these were 10 and 20 min captures/conversions. If the capture was say 1:40Hr... Caping to huffyuv then using software encode to MPEG2, VBR dual pass, is a much better way. I didn't do a test because this doesn't need elaboration it is so obvious.

For <1:30Hr captures, just do direct MPEG2 with MMC. Not that it does a bad job on longer caputers, it is fine for 1:40Hr too at full res, but beyond that you need to
(1) lower res from 720
(2) lower bitrate
to make sure it fits on DVD single layer.

In such a case, a dual pass VBR software encode will give you maximum results. Ideal is VHS to huffyuv to soft MPEG2 (procoder, mainconcept, tmpeg)

Now, if you have a DL burner and a DL disk, such issues are not concerns.

Of course, the 3 patches don't work on new drivers and mmc's over 7.7 I think. I know they don't on 9.1 and above.

MMC can't so protected VHS. You will need a black box if fair use is something that is legal in your place and a thing you care about.

Frankly, even if you edit the capture, going to MPEG2 right away is fine as long as you go ultra high q (bitrate) mpeg2. You shouldn't see a benefit to caping to huffyuv over such an MPEG2. I know I don't and I am ultra critical over every pixel. Though I certainly would not save the intermittent results back to MPEG2 until the final render. You often need to render between programs. It is stupid to compress it between programs. In such a case you save it to Huffyuv. The only program that I know gets around this issue is Edius...

Another benefit of Huffyuv may be better shade (contrast) but I found this to be very inconclusive in my tests. In short if it is better, it is hard to tell.

Of course, not all hardware encoders are created the same. No doubt Huffyuv is a brilliant choice for most users. My experiance here, to be exact is the 9600 AIW MPEG2 with 9.1, new WDM vs HUffyuv to soft MPEG2.

[dreamking12]

Thats awesome, thanx for the great info. I'm going to try it first chance I get.

[MacHarborGuy]

here is my set-up for capturing video...

100GB dedicated HDD for video recordings
FireWire 1384 PCI card
DataVideo DAC-100 Firewire Video Capture device
2.4GHz Celeron D (suck, yes, but I was on a budget when building my new PC)
1GB of RAM

Longest recording I did was 4 hours straight (WrestleMania 21 this past April). No dropped frames what so ever, and it captured at TV quality (when I export the video back to my TV thru the DAC-100, the difference in quality is... there is no difference.

I do all of my MPEG-2 encoding on my Mac since my PC has a hell of a time dealing with TMPGEnc (plus my 1.4GHz G4 system encoded the whole thing in about 1/4th the time TMPGEnc would have taken (mac was using the highest settings, whereas TMPGEnc was using the lowest)).

Not sure why my PC doesn't like encoding. Maybe it's the processor. All I know is that I have loved every minute of recording via the PC.

I am also happy that I was able to get the DAC-100 for $100 (got it in 2002) whereas it now sells for between $150 and $200.

[victoriabears]

Wow this is such a good thread here is my experience, comments please , you guys are always so helpful.

My points out of 10, are based on the best I have obtained being 10.

1: vcr , either uk jvc s-vhs 2mb digipure 8965 model, or ntsc model 9911/sr10u(aewsome)>avt8710 or datavideo tbc1000>advc300>firewire>Canopus Lets convert
= 10/10 equal with as above but using a RJ tech DVDRW dvd recorder(Think uses the Lsi chip Lordsmurf raves about)

2: As above but using Cyberlink Power producer/Mainconcept 1.4 Capture mode software- 6/10

3: Using ATI AIW 9800 Pro and using Lordsmurfs settings from Digital FAQ,again same starting point hardware, have tried everythingWell almost
:- vcr>tbc>svideo on aiw,composite,no tbc,with advc300 and cannot get a decent capture with AMD 64 3400+(2.41ghz) 1gb ram, Gigabyte motherboard. What the hell am I doing wrong if Lordsmurf says this is the pinnacle(Forget pun!) of captures chains.
= 4/10, at this rate its going back!!

4: MSI TV Anywhere as a mpeg capture card in place of ATI AIW=3/10

So, at this stage of my experiments I am looking to go to a Canopus MPEG hardware encoder like mpr 1000- any opinions on the cira US$700 Canopus devices guys.

If it were not the for 2 hour limit on a dvd recorder I would stick to that and author on the computer-it is so easy, and if I cannot get better results from a hardware encoder thats the route I'll go.

My main issue with my 10/10 solution is that it is the best I've done but it looks like it has saran wrap over it (Cling film in the UK).

The capture to avi and encoding is possible for some of my projects, but oh so boring- for that I vote Procoder Express, its very nice and faster than Tmpenc.

Over to you great guys on this forum-lots of advice/ideas to carry on this great "round tabele" thread please.

[MacHarborGuy]

when it comes to the software side of things....

On the PC
WinDV for recording the TV shows. I haven't gotten into the whole Tivo/All-In-Wonder thing yet (and would need yet another bug HDD to hold the extra video) but for one-shot recordings, WinDV hasn't failed yet. No dropped frames, with 15 minute recordings all the way up to 4 hours (me love firewire).

I did have to install a patch for XP that would boost up the firewire performance though. XP limits the datarate to 100Mbps rather than the normal 400 (or 800).


On the Mac
Quicktime Player - I simply copy the seperate avi files into a QuickTime reference file (about 4MB that just links over to the other movies) and then run that thru the MPEG-2 encoder.

I am currently testing out ffmpegX to see how it handles encoding. Started it at about 10PM Saturday night, now it is 12 Midnight and it is at 13% (using a bunch of high quality settings too). I am not sure if the progress bar resets for the second pass, but I will be out of town tonday so it's not like I need the mac then.

I used to use iMovie for the recording before I built my PC. Just hated lugging my G4 tower from my hobby shop (where the DSL is) to my home (where the cable TV is).

Doing some H.264 tests with Tiger too, seeing if it's worth my time. It will slow down the MPEG-2 encode, but hey, I'll be asleep in an hour.