Capture AVI vs. MPEG

[Bud]

When using Capture which would be the best format to capute in AVI or MPEG and why? Thanks in advancd

Bud

[homerpez]

If you have space (and lots of it, like 50GB or more), capture AVI. Huffy codec is good (lossless, but usually around 2:1 compression over normal AVI).

If you do plain VCD, you can use either, but still AVI is better quality. If you do SVCD, capture with at least 480 height, so you get both fields (I guess that would be another question there)...

Just keep in mind, that AVI is drastically better, but also takes up drastically more space than MPEG. I have a 55GB drive to capture on, and I can only get 2, 2 1/2 hours or so of 480x480 AVI capture. But the results are identical to the source.

If you do AVI, use VirtualDub if you can, and compress your audio somewhat too, to save on space. I use ADPCM compression, only 4:1 but saves a lot of space.

[loudanddeep]

The basic answer:

It depends on what you want to watch the video on, and how long you want to take to get it there.

The real answer: read the whatis, the how to, watch the boards, and then it will be obvious.

The part that is not going to be obvious, is;
1 - how to do it, not which way you want to do it.

dp

[alkieman]

I think it depends more on what you want to do with the output once it's captured. If you want to burn straight to VCD/SVCD or DVD without any editing then capturing straight to appropriate MPEG file format is the quickest way to go.

If you want to do any editing then AVI is your best choice. As stated before capturing to AVI takes up huuuuuuuge amounts of disk space so the answer is to use some form of compression when capturing. Two of the most popular compression codecs are MJPEG and Huffyuv.

MJPEG is a lossy format like MPEG but whereas MPEG works on groups of pictures, MJPEG works on each individual frame and treats each like a seperate JPEG image. It is a lossy format though and can lead to artefacts if you encode your final movie to MPEG for VCD/SVCD or DVD. The advantage is that you can store a lot of video on a large hard disk.

Huffyuv doesn't compress as well as MJPEG but it's free and because it doesn't compress as much, the final output can be higher. It does have higher hardware requirements for capturing without dropping frames however.

You should also remember if you capture to AVI that you will then have additional time needed to encode to MPEG if thats your final output format required.

Check out the guides on this site and on some of the sites mentioned in the links section. You'll find all the how to guides there.

[Bud]

Many thanks for all the response I have received on this, the grand plan is to keep the capture on VCD, most will require some form of editing i.e music special that have commercials and that sort of thing.

Bud

[Roginator]

It also seems to depend on the quality of your capture card.

I was using an old STB TV card (BT84 to capture to avi at 720x480 using the Huffyuv codec. I am getting better-looking captures with a Creative Video Blaster VCR set to maximum MPEG2 quality.