Blocky/ Pixelated VCD capture on PC

[simonko]

Whenever I try to capture VCD 2.0 mpeg on my computer It comes out all blocky and pixelated like Legos, its that bad.

When It captures I can get the first few seconds perfect then it turns into lego fest.

The mpegs it creates on my computer look like Lego Island. I try playing it back in different players (ms media player, quicktime, ati multimedia player) and it still looks like lego island.

I can capture AVI perfect but any Mpeg looks like crap nomatter what settings I use.

Please post any advice or comments.

Im using:
AMD Athlon 800
Asus SiS 630/730 video
ATI Wonder VE capture card
112MB RAM
30 gig HD

ATI Multimedia Center 7.1 "trying to capture with VCD option,Digital VCR"
DirectX 8.0 with ms directx video capture patch
Windows 98

[deadpac]

MMC is pretty horrible when it comes to capturing directly to MPEG unless you have an ATI card that does the hardware compression with software helping the compression along.

What you are doing is leaving all of the the compression work to your PC, not your ATI Wonder VE, your card is only bringing the video into your computer; MMC is doing the compression.

Besides and Athlon 800 seems pretty weak to be capturing MPEG on the fly.

Try using other MPEG capture software apps such as Power VCR II and see what kind of results you get, if your results are the same, then it's your computer, if your results get better then it's ATI's MMC, I never had the chance to use the ATI card I had with MMC, stuck to VirtualDub and capped Uncompressed AVI's with it and then encoded using TMPGEnc; the results you get from an AVI > MPEG procedure will produce results that are atleast 10x better than anything you could hope to achieve with software MPEG caps.

[Scobo]

I haven't seen a software capture (at standard VCD settings) of acceptable quality yet.
The best results I have seen are with Ulead Video Studio 5.
I set the quality to maximum (15) and use a bitrate of 2000kbps.
Of course, these settings are XVCD and won't play in all DVD players but, if yours does, I would recommend this program.
The captured MPG file requires multiplexing to VCD standard with a program such as TMPGEnc. This only takes a minute or so then the file can be burned to CD.
I use Nero and the disks play back perfectly with very decent quality on my DVD player (Rowa 280).
I would say at least as good as AVI to MPG with TMPGEnc and VCD template.

[simonko]

All 3rd party software wont recognize my ATI TV Wonder VE as a capture card. They say "Cannot detect VFM driver" .... I have WDM drivers... that come with the card/ software I installed.

So im stuck using ATI multi media center....

[alucard2050]

for those that are stuck with with MMC. i would look to the left under tools and try the other encoders. i myself cannot use anything that searches for the VFW drivers but IUVCR works very well for me.....i also have the WONDER VE.......

[malducci]

I use IUvcr like Alucard. If you can afford the space for an AVI( I used 24bit uncompressed ), then use IUvcr to capture the AVI and use Panasonic MPEG1 VCD encoder to encode the VCD's. I have gotten extremely good results with great looking VCD's. Here are the settings that I use.

Capture AVI to 480x480 @ 29.97 24bit uncompressed
apply the deinterlace filter with VirtualDub (use the "best" setting)
save this back to an AVI
open the converted AVI with the Panasonic encoder.
There aren't much to adjust on the settings for the VCD other than video filtering and such.

Note: I haven't tried to used 4gig avi's with the encoder, all mine are segmented into 2gig avi's.

[malducci]

Oh yeah, I let Panasonic encoder resize the video to 352x240. You can get better results if you capture at higher resolution and resize than to capture and the normal 240 or 288 vertical resolution. Don't for get that you have to deinterlace the high resolution. VirtualDub does a great job of this, just don't select anything but the top option in the configuration - I forget what it is called at the moment, but it reads , "(best)" next to it.

Hope that helps.

[Anonymous65]

If you want to do real-time VCD captures, only a hardware encoder will do a good job. Perhaps if you have a 2 gig CPU you can get good real-time captures, but otherwise, a hardware encoder card like the PV231 will do the trick. http://steve.kittelsen.com/pv231

[alucard2050]

malducci- how do you set it to 24bit uncompressed. i mean i can set it to uncompressed but where do you get 24bit from????

[malducci]

Alucard - In the video settings in IUvcr, you can choose the capture format and the compression. Under "capture format", the default setting is YUV2 - RGB24bit is the top setting on the scroll bar(above RGB555). Sorry, I'm not in front of it right now, but RGB24bit give great color spacing.

[fspta]

I use ATI ALL-IN-WONDER 128 Pro with MMC7.1 and 7.5

Does anyone know if the PRO 128 is a hardware capable board for MPEG-1 encoding....

Thanks,