Capturing: Radeon AIW, cable TV, straight to DivX

[Mirror_Image]

I love movies, old and new. Most movies are not that good; for every good film like 'Pulp Fiction' or 'L.A. Confidential', there are, unfortunately, 10 or 20 crap-flicks out there released contemporaneously.

Luckily we've got the better part of a century's worth of films to choose from. Recent productions I just buy on DVD and watch on the big screen home theater, but that's the new stuff...

I have an "old movie" (i.e 'Citizen Kane', 'Goodbye, Mr. Chips', etc.) passion (they may not be flashy with cool effects and DTS, but there's more to a good film than flash and cool SGI, such as script, direction, and acting talent from Frederic March, Orson Welles, and Charles Laughton, just to name a few), and that is my motivation to record those fine old movies.

I get them off of Turner Movie Classics (TMC); they are commercial-free, letter-boxed (if possible), and the TMC logo pops up almost never (for some reason they are good about those damn logos that most cable channels bolt to the screen 24 hours a day). My capture setup is nothing fancy, but it's the lazy man's way and the results are perfectly satisfactory, as far as I'm concerned

Video Capture: ATI AIW Radeon and MMC 7.1 using DivX v4.12 codec, on a P3-866

There are more complicated ways to capture video from cable TV (many of them offering top-notch quality), but I like this method, because I'm lazy, and the captured file size is small. There is one post-processing step (to compress the sizeable audio track and synch the audio to the video). The end product movie fits on 2 disks (sometimes 1 for real short old flicks, and sometimes 3 for epics like 'Spartacus' or 'Judgment at Nuremberg').

I have ATI MMC 7.1 "Digital VCR" set to capture at 320x240, NTSC 29.97 fps, 44,100kHz 16-bit stereo, using the DivX v4.12 codec for the video (the audio is not compressed during capture). The resolution is just fine for this kind of source!

DivX settings are:

1-pass
Slowest (best quality)
1500 kb/sec (CBR, I like being able to predict filesize. I arrived at this bit rate after doing captures at different bit rates and 1500 kb/sec was the best size/quality compromise. Remember, these stay DivX and are only watched on a 19" PC monitor; I don't do VCD or MPEG or anything like that)
Max keyframe interval: 300 frames
Deinterlace: NOT checked (320x240 capture, not needed)
Postprocessing slider: 6 (all the way to the right)
1-pass parameters: 12,2,2000,10,20
Encoding quality: 100%

This gives me a fairly small file, and the postprocessing 'framerate/interleave adjustment/MP3 audio compression' step only takes about 40 minutes for the average 2-hour movie.

Postprocessing (using Virtual Dub 1.4.8):

Having the postprocessing slider set to 6 during capture means the blocking and halos are taken care of, and I'm happy with the video quality as-is (so video stays set to Direct Stream Copy).

I set the audio interleave to "every 30 frames" and set the video framerate to "Change so video and audio durations match" (VDub does the figuring here, and VDub usually ups the frame rate from the capture's 29.970 to ~29.972 to synch everything; it's rare that I need to enter an offset, the frame rate change usually fixes everything). I set the audio to Full Processing Mode, MP3, 96k/sec 44,100kHz 16-bit stereo, I wait 40 minutes (only a P3-866) and the file is done. I then split it, usually to two files (sometimes 3) and burn to disks (including the DivX 4.12 and FH MP3 codecs on disk 1 of each movie, just in case, along with full cast and crew credits and a readme.txt explaining how to install the codecs if you need them).

That's my crummy method. CD-Rs are so cheap, they're almost free, cheaper than VHS tapes anyway, and much more durable.

[Pace]

Nice to know someone is as lazy as I am.
I capture directly to DivX too... Settings are quite different, due to the fact that my CPU is a bit faster (1,5GHz Celeron), here goes:
Resolution: 480x576 (PAL)
1-pass
Slowest
800-1600kb/sec (If I record a movie, and want it to fit one CD, then low bitrate, usually 1400kb/sec)
Max keyframe interval: 250 frames
Deinterlace: checked
Postprocessing: Full
1-pass parameters: 9,4,2000,10,20

Afterwards I usually encode audio to 44100hz, 16-bit, stereo 64kb WMA. Not because I like WMA, but because encoding of it is so fast compared to MP3 (WMA: 550fps, MP3: 150fps). That means that audio of a movie (2-hour) is encoded in couple of minutes whereas MP3 would take atleast 15min. I haven't got that much time to spare.