Capture Cards with hardware compression to Xvid/Divx?

[quantass]

I'm looking to capture (or digitize as i used to call it back in the Amiga days) videos from my VHS tapes to XVid/Divx. Is there a capture card for PCI (or USB if fast enough) that supports live capturing to AVI. I have a P4 1.7GHZ so it would be nice if its capable of hardware compression on the capture card.

Thanks for any recommendations.

[guns1inger]

I have only seen one, from Compro. Don't know what the model is. There is a USB Mpeg-2 H.264 encoder for the Macs as well.

[jagabo]

There are several USB capture devices with hardware MPEG 4, part 2 (Divx/Xvid) encoding. The Plextor ConvertX PX-TV402U, the Leadtek WinFast TV USB II Deluxe, etc.

If you live in an NTSC country you won't be happy with the results though. The last I saw, their solution to interlacing was to blend the fields together or throw one away. They won't deliver good quality with low bitrates with noisy VHS sources.

[SHS]

Plextor ConvertX 402U or 432P and Elsa EX-Vision 1700TV are the only Realtime Hardware DivX Encoder nobody else build one and as for XviD there are none.
If you ref to the ADS InstantVideo To Go USB H.264 or Elgato's Turbo 264 guns1inger it is not a Hardware DivX Encoder is base a round H.264.

[FulciLives]

You would be better off going with a hardware MPEG-2 DVD spec capture card/device.

The 3 most popular being the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-250, the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-350 and the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR USB2. The first two are PCI cards with the last one being a USB 2.0 device. All do hardware MPEG-2 capture so will work great with your less-than-fast computer (no offense meant).

MPEG-2 DVD spec handles interlaced video very well and of course you can burn to a DVD and play back on any DVD player. The DivX and XviD formats are terrible for interlaced video and should be avoided for your VHS archiving.

If money and space is a concern please remember that quality DVD media can be bought for about 35 cents per disc these days. As for space it is true that about 2 hours would be the most you would want to put onto one DVD disc but that's at what is called Full D1 resolution. If you use Half D1 resolution then your VHS stuff will look nearly as good as Full D1 while allowing you to easily get about 3 1/2 hours onto a single disc with about the same quality as 2 hours of Full D1 resolution. Having said that ... with HDTV type displays having such high resolutions and becoming the norm ... I would still go with Full D1 and the 2 hour or less recording per disc. In the end it will be sharper than Half D1 and look better in the future on a HDTV type display. Again if space is a concern you can use CD "wallets" to store the discs as they hold a ton of discs in a small amount of space. You can even buy standard size DVD cases that are slim (half the thickness of the kind you normally get with a retail DVD) and these can store 2 discs per case allowing you to store 4 discs in 2 cases with the same shelf space as one standard size type DVD case.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[Stonechatz]

Archos 704/605/705 encode to Divx 4.0 on the fly. If you can get a 40Gb version cheaply, it is the quickest, and to my mind, best quality 'instant' Divx at the price. It has no probs with interlace, NTSC or PAL. The only prob it has is that it pixellates (!PIXELLATES!) when there is a deal of FAST FAST motion. But that is very seldom. I now convert all DV, VHS, DVD, PAL DVB-T directly, and then cut using VDub to extract all the adverts. I recommend. To make use of the space on my 80Gb 704, I often convert the Divx 4.0 files to Xvid - the quality is equal, but the filesizes are half that of Divx. Vdub can do this, and it takes about 2 hours for a conversion (Dixv to Xvid) for a 2 hour Archos file.

[FulciLives]

Archos 704/605/705 encode to Divx 4.0 on the fly. If you can get a 40Gb version cheaply, it is the quickest, and to my mind, best quality 'instant' Divx at the price. It has no probs with interlace, NTSC or PAL. The only prob it has is that it pixellates (!PIXELLATES!) when there is a deal of FAST FAST motion. But that is very seldom. I now convert all DV, VHS, DVD, PAL DVB-T directly, and then cut using VDub to extract all the adverts. I recommend. To make use of the space on my 80Gb 704, I often convert the Divx 4.0 files to Xvid - the quality is equal, but the filesizes are half that of Divx. Vdub can do this, and it takes about 2 hours for a conversion (Dixv to Xvid) for a 2 hour Archos file.

It makes no sense to capture in DivX only to then re-encode to XviD. You might as well just capture to MPEG-2 and then re-encode to XviD and in the end you will get better quality and a process that takes just as long.

The Hauppauge hardware assisted MPEG-2 recording devices I mentioned in my earlier post all have the ability to capture MPEG-2 at up to 15,000kbps which creates one hell of a nice "master" file for editing and conversion to XviD. You aren't going to get pixelization on that type of capture.

As for interlaced DivX and XviD ... yes it can be done ... but playing it back properly (especially on hardware capable DivX/XvidD hardware) can be damn tricky.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[jagabo]

Archos 704/605/705 encode to Divx 4.0 on the fly... It has no probs with interlace

I bet it does a blend or drop field deinterlace. Could you post a small sample?