Capturing VHS to AVI

[jagabo]

MPEG 4 is not necessarily more lossy than MPEG 2. It all depends on what settings you use.

[lordsmurf]

MPEG 4 is not necessarily more lossy than MPEG 2. It all depends on what settings you use.

MPEG-4 does have some issues, however. It's why HD tech is largely ignoring it. AVC/H.264 and MPEG-2 is really where the quality is.

[jagabo]

MPEG 4 is not necessarily more lossy than MPEG 2. It all depends on what settings you use.

MPEG-4 does have some issues, however.

Like...?

[edDV]

Method 5 is to use a stand alone DVD Recorder senario. Input processing chips are improving but none have optimized yet for VHS transfer.

Oh, I disagree with that one. I think LSI Logic has done a great job on their DoMiNo chipset line, used in JVC, LiteOn, LG and others. It specifically address grain and chroma noise, major drawbacks to VHS quality.

The only downside is they are not fully adjustable by the user. But then again, the default settings are perfect most of the time anyway. I have few tapes where I wish it was more or less.

Unlike graphics cards companies that started to dabble in computer video, LSI Logic is experienced with integrated video hardware at the professional level. Several DVD chipset makers are like that.

I agree things are getting better. What I meant is they haven't optimized for VHS with time base correction and bandpass filtering to reduce captured noise. An ideal machine would have switchable bandpass filters and a full frame sync TBC.

[GMaq]

capturing to a lossier format (divx) to edit and then re-encoding to mpeg2 goes against everything I've ever learned here

This is DivX HARDWARE Encoding which is unique to the Plextor M402U, The bitrates at the best quality settings are up to 4000kbps, The quality is visually similar to Software .avi encoding with an MJPEG Codec (i.e. PICVideo). This is a whole different thing than realtime software encoding which sucks with pretty much all MPEG-4 Codecs (except 3ivx). Otherwise I agree that this would be back-assward to the Status Quo