MMC 7.5/MPEG Capture File Sizes

[jpfrantz]

I have captured several items, using both the TV input and the composite input, straight to MPEG2 and I have noticed the following weirdness with the resulting MPEG file.

If I capture anything over about 45 minutes, the resulting MPEG file is always about 4gig in size. The MPEG files I've captured are:

80 mins. home movie (4gig)
60 mins. Enterprise show (4 gig)
90 mins. Cats and Dogs movie (4 gig)

What the heck? I've captured some to AVi, used VirtualDub and TMPGenc to end up with an MPEG2 file and the results are about a quarter of the size. I would like to go straight to MPEG using MMC (burn to DVD) so I don't have to post-process and AVI files. Has anyone seen this problem? Are there any settings I need to set that I have missed?

Thanks,
JP

------------------------
Compaq Presario 7000
2 Ghz P4
1 Gb RAM
40, 60 GB drives
ATI AIW Radeon 32Mb DDR
Windows ME

[Nicki]

I have the same capture card as you and I use mmc. The thing is, the largest output file it allows is only 4 GB.

[pepehdez]

Windows won't allow files to be bigger than 4GB.
The difference in size is because of the bitrate. Bigger bitrate=Bigger files.
Play with the bitrate, that will solve the problem.

[eclipsed]

You can setup in MMC control panel to break up the file to size less than 4GB to overcome this 4GB limit.

[jeex]

windows will allow you to capture files larger than 4gb, but you must be using a version of windows that supports the ntfs file system, such as nt 4.0, 2k, & xp.. the normal home version flavors of windows 9x & me use the fat32 file system which has a maximum file size of 4gb... ntfs allows some ridiculously huge file size that none of us will use for probably 20 years.. i'm not even sure they have hard drives that big yet..

[leebo]

What everybody seems to overlook (and what the original poster seems to be implying), is that all of his captures are different lengths, yet they all ended up 4 gigs in size.

So how did MMC know what bitrate to use to end up with a 4 gig file, w/o knowing how long the capture would be?

Or am I missing something? I have only used TV on demand and the scheduler to capture. Did he have to set the capture time himself?
If so, does MMC overide your quality settings to fit the program length?

[jpfrantz]

Leebo,

Correct. My capture times are different but my file sizes are the same. For the Enteprise capture, I used the scheduler to start and stop. For the home video, I manually started and stopped. For the Cats&Dogs capture, I manuall started the capture, and the Digital VCR stopped itself at 90 minutes. All using the same Capture settings (DVD). I'm not sure if MMC overrides to fit file sizes or not. Rather weird. Especially since I know I can post-process AVI files and get MPEG files that are a lot smaller for an hour+ of video than what the MMC captures. Could it be that their MPEG encoder is whacked?

JP

[Sulik]

Again, edit the MPEG preset in MMC 7.5 to set your own bitrate and/or automatic file splitting.
The only reason your captures are all the same size is because they reached the 4GB limit, not because of some extreme coincidence.

[leebo]

So why are his captures, using the same settings, different sizes but not the same length?