hi, first, thanks a lot to everybody here, I have been learning a lot from this forum.

briefly - that quality rating in avicodec - what does it mean really? It's not dropped frames - what does it correspond to ??



The reason I ask is that, on the same computer, same video clip, a few minutes apart, I transferred with WinDV, Ulead Movie, and Scenealyzer. The WinDV and Scenealyzer .avi files both get a 98% quality rating, but the Scenealyzer looks definitely sharper. What is confusing to me is, that the Ulead-created file gets only a 58% quality rating but also looks sharper than the WinDV, particularly when I look at it in ArcSoft Showbiz and stop a frame to see details. It is maybe a little less good than Scenealyzer.

I never used WinDV or Scenealyzer before today, and have used the Ulead to capture from VHS but never used it until recently to capture DVcamera. This whole thing was prompted by my thinking the Ulead capture didn't look so great, then investigating, finding avicodec....


Scenario of why I am doing this - I have these home movies on a Canon Optura60 (miniDV) which are of huge sentimental value, so I have been going crazy trying to figure out the exact best way to transfer to my hard drive. So far, I have upgraded my videocard, finally gotten WinXP SP2, and done a variety of system tweaks to improve the transfer. I'm using a Firewire port in an Adaptec DuoConnect card in a PCI slot, defragmented, plenty of hard drive, all other apps (I think) turned off.

It's not that my files are awful. I just would like to know that they are as good as it's possible for them to be. And I'm really confused why what I'm seeing doesn't seem to correspond to the quality as called by avicodec. So I was wondering exactly what parameter avicodec is looking at. Sorry if it's answered somewhere - I looked but couldn't find it.