Simple Capture Driving Me Insane

[HeadRusch]

I bought Pinnacle Studio to do basic movie creation using my old 8mm video camera. It came with a DC10 mJPEG codec video card.

Later I purchased a cheap TV Tuner card that also allowed me to capture video.

Today, I have one simple desire...and I can't seem to get it done without jumping through a bazillion hoops: I WANT TO CAPTURE MUSIC VIDEOS from VH1 Classic.

Thats it, thats all

IF: I go from svideo out into the SVIDEO IN of my DC10 card, I get nice high quality captures.
These are created as mjpeg AVI files. media Player classic can play them, but TMPGENC cannot open them. So I can't convert to mpeg or mpeg 2.

FIRST I have to open the file in VirtualDub Pro.....I have to then convert that file to a raw avi file..so a 3 minute music video that takes up 600megs in mjpeg now takes up 5 gigabytes. THEN I have to use TMPGENC to conver that raw AVI file into an MPEG of my choosing.

All in all....its a huge colossal pain in the ass.

OH..and before someone asks, OUTPUTTING to Mpeg2 via Pinancle Studio 7 produces a fairly lousy MPEG2 file.


SO...I said "what about the svideo of the Capture Card". Well, its crap. It gives me visible video distortion. Basically, unusable.

SO: I am left with the following questions: IS there a way for TMPGENC to read the mjpeg AVI files created by the DC10 capture card?

IF NOT...what would be a better way of doing this...if I chuck the DC10 card, and I chuck the cheap TV Tuner card...what do I buy that is relatively cheap?

Do i buy something that encodes directly to mpeg2 on the fly? (my PC is a 2.2ghz P4).

I tried to use iuVCR as my capture program but all it does is lock everything up on my box, so I keep going back to using Pinnacle Studio to do the captures.

Can someone help me out of this mess without me having to spend more than $100 bucks on new hardware? $100 bucks is my upper limit for what I'm trying to do.

PS: I'd still probably use the basic video editing properties of Studio 7, but is there an advantage to buying one of the new STUDIO packages that comes with a capture card and video studio 10?? Or am I just going back to where I am now with the DC10..are the files unreadable with other software...??

Help? Thanks!

[redwudz]

TMPGEnc should read that format. Have you tried this:

If you have problem open DV video, DC30+,MJPEG captured video or any AVI VFW
Then try to change the settings in TMPGEnc under Option->Environmental settings->VFAPI plug-in and right click on the AVI VFW and increase the priority to 2 and try reopen the video.

If all else fails, you could try a encoder program like SUPER. It handles most formats.

I'm not sure if the latest version of Gspot (2.52) can read it, but you could post a screenshot from Gspot and someone may see the problem there.

[Nelson37]

Try Huffy for the Codec, also Frameserve from Vdub to the encoder, no need to create the huge AVI.

[RabidDog]

Buy a new mpeg2 encoder card. Some people like the haup pvr150 but I cannot vouch for/against it.