Use Which? ATI AIW 2006 PCI-e, Hauppauge PVR500, or Panasonic PV-GS250?

[TambourineMan]

I have ATI All-In-Wonder 2006 PCI-express (x1300 series GPU) and Hauppauge PVR500 video cards and a Panasonic PV-GS250 camcorder which does analog to digital conversion available to convert VHS tapes to digital.

Which should I use to convert VHS tapes (taken by camcorder) to digital format to ultimately burn to DVD?

The video card input would be over coax whereas the input from the VHS player to the camcorder would be composite video and then firewire out from the camcorder to the PC.

I have an AMD 3400+ and 7200 rpm DM5 harddrives.

As for the camcorder, the DigtalFAQ website says "DV colorspace is often harmful to analog color quality, especially if converting VHS to DVD" but I do not understand what that means/implies.

The AIW can capture to AVI using software encoding whereas the Haauppauge only captures to MPEG but uses hardware encoding.

Any advice, insights, or thoughts appreciated.

[TambourineMan]

Actually I just remembered/found my AIW breakout boxes which allow me to input composite video to the AIW, so I guess that is the best route to go.

My only problem now is that I get a "the record operation has failed" message when using the HuffyUV codec and when using the UYVY codec, the first try at capturing a 2 hour VHs tape resulted in 93MB (+) .AVI file (probably larger, but I ran out of disk space)

[jagabo]

No lossless codec will be able to compress VHS captures by very much. Too much noise.

[TambourineMan]

For my first capture try, I used the program that came with my camcorder (MotionStudioDV Lite) and fed the VCR composite output to the camcorder and then fed that by the DV (IE1394) out to the PC. It captured it. I forget the file size, but it was under 20 gig for the full 2 hours, in fact I think it was under 10 gig. The resulting size of the files to write to a DVDR was about a gig. Maybe that process used some filters to filter out the noise?

When using the composite in on my AIW, I followed the procedure in DigitalFAQ and used ATI MMC. http://www.digitalfaq.com/dvdguides/capture/atiavi/atiavi.htm. Should I try a different program that would capture to AVI but filter out the noise, or just capture to MPEG using ATI's MMC?

The tape I am converting was not made by my Panasonic PV-GS250, but another unknown camcorder and it's not the highest quality around, so I do not need a lossless conversion, but rather just the best I can get.

[jagabo]

DV AVI (what you normally capture via firewire) is about 13 GB per hour.

Lossless codecs with the same frame size will get you around 20 to 40 GB per hour.

MPEG will depend on the bitrate you capture at but DVD compatible settings will be in the 2 to 4 GB per hour range.

If you don't need to do extensive filtering and don't want to spend a lot of time recompressing the video I'd recommend using the PVR-500. You can use its proc amp controls to set the brightness, contrast, hue, saturation, sharpness, and noise filtering before capturing. Make yourself a half D1 template to capture VHS at 352x480. If you don't need much more than an hour on a single layer DVD capture at 720x480.

If you plan on lots of filtering and don't have problems with dropped frames use the AIW. Capture at 720x480, HuffYUV if you can afford the disk space. If you don't need to put much more than an hour on a single layer DVD convert to MPEG 2 at 720x480. For more than than use 352x480. The smaller frame size lets you get away with a lower bitrate.

Between those two extremes is the DV camcorder option. The color subsampling issue of DV isn't too bad for VHS in most cases. DV AVI is also a good format for editing. Useful if you plan on lots of cuts, pastes, filtering, transitions, etc.

[TambourineMan]

I am finally able to capture using my Hauppauge PVR-500 using composite video. So far I have been using VirtualDub, but I do not know if that is the best program to use.

I am getting very frustrated trying to figure out if my PVR-500 is based on the BT878 chip. I think it is based on an ivac chip (what ever that is).

I decided to follow Hauppauge's instructions on how to get the PVR-500 to work on Xp Pro (versus MCE) so I used HWClear to get rid of all my old drivers. The Hauppauge online guides are not that good. Tehy imnply that I can use WinTV 32 or 2000 with my PVR-500, but I kept getting error messaages when I tried and now I find that those programs don't work with dual tuners.

I tried to install the latest Hauppauge WDM drivers but that didn't work, so I used the ones on the CD that came with the card and then updated them, but I can't tell if they really were updated. There are some better drivers for BT878 cards but I can't tell if they work with my PVR-500.

Anyway some people think VirtualDub does not work well with WDM based cards (if that is what the PVR-500is) and that for cards suign WDM (rather than VFW) iuVCR should be used as the Microsoft based VFWtoWDM driver has bugs (what MS product doesn't?)

I can get fairly good video and seemingly synchronized sound using VirtualDub - should I stick with that? (Although both 1.7 and 1.6.14 versions of VirtualDub keeps crashing whenever I change certain settings. although I can just start it up again and the setting has been changed.

So what capture program shoudl I use witha Hauupauge PVR-500 to capture VHS camcorder tapes over composite video in?

[jagabo]

Hauppauge's web site has a picture of the PVR-500:

http://www.hauppauge.com/pages/products/data_pvr500mce.html
http://www.hauppauge.com/images/pvr500_b.jpg

From that you can see that the card contains a CX23416 MPEG encoder chip and a CX25843 video A/D converter (I'm pretty sure the other two chips are memory chips):

http://www.conexant.com/servlets/DownloadServlet/RED-200463-001.pdf?docid=464&revid=1

No BT878 chip in site. Note that Conexant bought BrookTree a while back so maybe there's some possiblity that it's BT878 compatible. I highly doubt it though.

Have you tried SageTV, BeyondTV or AMCap?

[olyteddy]

Actually the CX23416 MPEG encoder chip was primarily designed for generating MPEG Transport streams for TV broadcast equipment. Hence the MP2 48 KHz audio. There is no compatability with BT878 chipsets at all.

[jagabo]

I was thinking the video A/D (the CX25843) might be compatible. Though, even if the chip is compatible, it probably doesn't present itself on the PCI bus the same way, if at all.

Here's a datasheet for the CX2584x family:

http://dl.ivtvdriver.org/datasheets/video/cx25840.pdf