Capture from virtualdub to WinTV 250?

[thermie]

Hello. I've a WinTV PVR 250 in my video capture computer, which is running WinXP SP1. My video card is an ATi Radeon 64 VIVO.

I'd rather prefer to use AVI instead of MPEG to capture video, so I thought I'd use VirtualDub.

It won't work, telling me the card cannot be found - despite showing the card in the list of available capture cards!



I've just downloaded and installed all of the latest ATi and WinTV 250 PVR drivers, but they made no difference; I still get the same error.

Has anybody else had this problem?

[reboot]

Nope, nobody else has ever had this problem. You can't capture avi with the PVR-250
It's a hardware mpeg-2 capture card.
If you want avi captures, you need a different card.
BTW, your video card has nothing to do with capturing avi either.

[lchiu7]

Hello. I've a WinTV PVR 250 in my video capture computer, which is running WinXP SP1. My video card is an ATi Radeon 64 VIVO.

I'd rather prefer to use AVI instead of MPEG to capture video, so I thought I'd use VirtualDub.

It won't work, telling me the card cannot be found - despite showing the card in the list of available capture cards!



I've just downloaded and installed all of the latest ATi and WinTV 250 PVR drivers, but they made no difference; I still get the same error.

Has anybody else had this problem?

I could be wrong but doesn't Virtualdub only support capture devices with VFW drives, not DirectShow and I think the PVR250 drivers are only DirectShow. Anyway I don't think there is any way to bypass the MPEG2 encoder on the card. If you want to capture in AI format (not MPEG) then you will need to get a cheaper card like a WinTV card.

I moved from capturing in AVI (usually PicVideo or sometimes Huffyuv) to capturing in MPEG2 using a PVR250 since it has saved all the time encoding the resultant file to MPEG2 prior to authoring to DVD and the MPEG2 files quality even in a medium setting is more than good enough for what I want

Larry

[junkmalle]

As everyone has pointed out, the PVR-250 is a hardware MPEG capture device. It cannot capture to AVI. In theory someone could write a program that takes the MPEG stream from the PVR-250, decodes it, and saves as AVI but I'm not aware of any program that does this. And it wouldn't be any different (except time wise) than just capturing the MPEG stream and converting to AVI afterwards.

If you're looking to do a lot of filtering and editing consider capturing at very high bitrates (15000 kpbs) to get the best output from the card. You'll see very little difference between the PVR-250 at 15000 kbps and an uncompressed AVI capture from another card.

[tmaxwell2435]

Sorry to resurrect this old thread but what software are people using to capture (VHS tapes etc) with the PVR-250 card?

Thanks!!!

[mats.hogberg]

Well, there's not that many options besides the bundled software...

/Mats

[SHS]

There alway SageTV Recorder but keep in mind that dosen't work with newer PVR 150 and 500 and a newer ver USB2
There are only 2 cards that can capture both in Hardware MPEG1/2 and AVI and they are the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR PCI, Hauppauge Roslyn (Blackbird), but the Roslyn board need a mod for it work rigth but this board is no longer being made becuase I beleave it is due to high cost any way if you look on top rigth hand side of the card in below screenshot you see it missing audio output connecter to go to a sound card line input which allow tools like VirtualDub to work.


The main reason why AVI tool don't work is because they where build to used the sound card and not direct input so why think all AVI capture card have to be hook to sound card weather it be External or Internal line input.
One other problem is that Hauppauge WinTV-PVR 150/250/350, etc don't output a reg AVI format it non standard format I think know as NV12.

[reboot]

GB-PVR works with all the Hauppauge PVR (hardware) cards.
There are also plugins that allow the captures to be immediately converted (re-encoded) to avi.

[wwjd]

Keep in mind that if you re-encode the PVR mpeg to avi on the fly you will be using your computers cpu to do so... which means that you will need to make sure most everything that runs in the background is turned off...otherwise you may lock up your system or make some poor video.

[wwjd]

I too prefer working with DV avi but I also have a PVR-250 which I use for capturing TV shows. Since it only does compliant mpeg, which it does fairly well, I started using Videoredo to make the frame accurate cuts and trims. I then use TDA to author. No audio sync issues and the process is relatively fast. In fact if you do not mind cutting and or trimming at I frames only, TDA will also work well without the Videoredo.