Hauppauge PVR-150 capture quality, help!

[granturissimus]

I have a VHS-C camcorder and 11 tapes which I recorded on it. I hooked up this camcorder to my PVR-150, and captured some live video through the yellow/white jacks. The captured video was great quality! It was perfect! Then I tried capturing the video by playing back one of my tapes in the same camcorder, and the capture quality was horrible! These are the tapes recorded in this very same camcorder, and when I try to capture them from this camcorder, the quality is bad. These tapes play back perfectly in the LCD screen of the camcorder, and they also play back perfectly when I connect the camcorder to TV, or when I play the tapes in a VCR (connected to a TV).

The capture card also records just as bad, and perhaps even worse, when I play my tapes back in a VCR and record with the card.

By bad capture quality, I mean the video is full of tiny miniature stretches, kinda like tears, but just stretches. They are tiny, but the whole video is full of them. The video also is more blurry than it is when played back on TV.

I dunno why this is happening. The capture card captures excellent video when I just capture live video directly from the camcorder, but when I turn on the tape playback, the captured video becomes terrible!

[FulciLives]

A live video feed is going to look better than one recorded to VHS-C simply because VHS-C isn't a very high quality format and therefore it cannot catch the full quality of the "live feed"

I suggest you download VLC media player and use it to take some snap shots of the video as recorded by your Hauppauge PVR-150 (please note that VLC media player is free software).

Here is the link: http://www.videolan.org/vlc/index.html

Anyway like I was saying ... take some snap shots of the video and post them here.

Also make sure your settings in the capture software are "maxed" out. You'll only get about 1 hour of video per DVD but it will help.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[granturissimus]

I will take pics tomorrow when I have access to my computer with the captured videos.

I understand what you're saying about VHS quality, but those VHS-C tapes play back with great quality on my TV when I hook up my camcorder to the TV or when I play those tapes in my VCR thats hooked up to the TV. Both my computer monitor and TV are LCD screens, but the captured quality on the computer is bad, while the tapes play back great on TV.

My capture quality is set to 9350Kbps, which is high enough.

[jagabo]

Note that TVs are designed to handle low resolutions material from a composite source, they will artificially sharpen the picture. They will also usually pump up the contrast and color saturation. Computer monitors expect to receive perfectly sharp video from a graphics card so they will make no attempt to sharpen the picture. Neither will they increase the contrast and saturation. To get a fairer comparison you should burn a DVD with your captured file and compare what that looks like via composite from a DVD player.

Are you sure the PVR-150 really gave you a 9350 kbps file? Check it with GSpot. Or at least via the file size. It should be around 70 MB per minute.

[granturissimus]

Note that TVs are designed to handle low resolutions material from a composite source, they will artificially sharpen the picture. They will also usually pump up the contrast and color saturation. Computer monitors expect to receive perfectly sharp video from a graphics card so they will make no attempt to sharpen the picture. Neither will they increase the contrast and saturation. To get a fairer comparison you should burn a DVD with your captured file and compare what that looks like via composite from a DVD player.

Are you sure the PVR-150 really gave you a 9350 kbps file? Check it with GSpot. Or at least via the file size. It should be around 70 MB per minute.

One step ahead of you... I burned a DVD following the instructions of the people on this forum. The video looked exactly as bad on TV as it did on my computer. The stretching/tearing was still there, and the blurriness and bad quality too.

Yes, it really does capture at 9350kbps... the file sizes are big.

Here are some screens of my capture quality:

This is the live capture directly from camcorder that's hooked up to the card:



And this is captured from the camcorder playing back one of my VHS-C tapes (which were recorded on this same camcorder years ago):



Notice the line at the bottom of the screen... it's turquoise in this image. It is even partially visible on the burned DVD. This line is not present at the live video. Also, notice all the stretching/tearing all over the screen, and compare the blurriness of the text. Also notice the fuzzy edges where the visible video meets black... they are not fuzzy on the live video though.

ALL this is NOT present when I play back the tape on my TV either directly from camcorder or from VCR. The video looks sharp and smooth and no blurriness or stretching/tearing.

[jagabo]

Notice the line at the bottom of the screen... it's turquoise in this image. It is even partially visible on the burned DVD. This line is not present at the live video.

That is head switching noise. It is present on all VHS tapes. It's worse on some decks than others. You don't see it on TV because TVs overscan the image -- the outer 5 percent of the frame (on each side) is not visible on the screen.

Also, notice all the stretching/tearing all over the screen,

I see normal interlaced* video. If you make your DVD correctly you won't see the comb artifacts on the TV. You will continue to see some horizontal jitter because you don't have a line time base corrector.

and compare the blurriness of the text. Also notice the fuzzy edges where the visible video meets black... they are not fuzzy on the live video though.

Tape has much less bandwidth than the VHS deck's passthrough electronics. On tape VHS has a luma resolution of roughly 360x576. Chroma resolution is about 50x288.

* With interlaced video each digital frame contains two half images, 720x288 with PAL video, one in all the even numbered scan lines, one in all the odd numbered scanlines. Each of those images comes from a different time and are meant to be viewed individually. So when you view the two images together as a frame on a computer you see comb artifacts.

[2Bdecided]

In VLC player, right click on the video, select video, deinterlace, mode = linear (or Yadif X 2 if you have recent VLC), deinterlace = on

All the lines / tearing will disappear. Unless you selected something wrong when capturing.

Cheers,
David.

[FulciLives]

VHS is crappy man. That's why people went with other formats like Hi8 or S-VHS or DV etc.

Your TV probably deinterlaces the video whereas your computer is not. That's part of the difference. Also the TV might have overscan (I say might because most LCD's can be set to have none but also usually have a setting that forces overscan which of course is handy when watching analog video ... like that from a VHS tape).

So it's not as bad as you think but VHS is kind of crappy

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[jagabo]

Also, your sample image has been improperly resized so that the two fields cannot be separated and displayed individually. Make sure that you are not resizing prior to encoding.

[granturissimus]

I did use Yadif X2 when I took those snapshots. The captured tape video is terrible with or without that deinterlacing turned on in VLC.

jagabo, what do you mean its not properly resized? You mean I selected wrong capture resolution? What should it be?

I also think i did make my DVD correctly and it was just as bad as on the computer.

Maybe it's my capture settings that are wrong, can someone tell me what they should be?

[jagabo]

I think the resize was done by the software you used to save the image because it is 720x540 -- a 4:3 frame size. But you should capture PAL video at 720x576. Upload a short clip with motion.

You can use mpg2cut2 or DgIndex to mark a small section of an MPG or VOB file and export it without re-encoding.

[granturissimus]

Heres a short clip. This is at 9350Kbps. I guess the right word would be judder, although I'm not sure. You can see it on the text... it leans and stretches all the time. This is very visible on a bigger screen, and looks bad. Also that annoying line at the bottom of the screen is also partially visible even when played through a DVD disk on TV. I am pretty sure I burned that sample DVD properly too... I was told how to do it on this forum.

When I hook up the camera to TV and play the tape through it, there is not judder, it looks sharp, only a tiny bit of flickering that's visible on the text, but not judder.

Im in Los Angeles though, my camcorder it NTSC, and that's how I captured it.

EDIT: THE CLIP IS IN MY NEXT POST

[poisondeathray]

The "leaning text" are TBC errors

But this sample is not as useful, because youtube re-encodes everything

(youtube also deinterlaces sometimes now too, but only single rate, so you only see 1/2 the motion samples)

The point is to upload an unprocessed sample so we can narrow where the problems might be

[granturissimus]

Oh sorry, I didn't know this site accepted such large file sizes, here is the sample video file itself: Test.mpg

[jagabo]

That looks about normal for a capture from a consumer VHS deck. It's 29.97 fps interlaced (59.94 fields per second), top field first. If burned to DVD properly it should look pretty close to playing the original VHS tape.

The horizontal jitter can be reduced with a line TBC. The bitrate is a bit high for DVD. Bitrate Viewer shows an average of 9384 kbps but peaks are over 10,000. I'd set the PVR-150 to a slightly lower bitrate if you wan't to burn to DVD without reencoding. The noise at the edges of the frame is normal. You can overwrite it with pure black borders. But doing so will require reencoding and will reduce quality. You won't normally see the edges of the frame on TV. Levels look a little off (a little black crush) and colors are over saturated and have a yellow shift (mostly because of the lighting and lack of white balance on the camera). There's a typical amount of chroma noise for VHS.

Here's what I get with VLC in Yadif 2x deinterlace mode:



No comb artifacts.

[granturissimus]

Thanks for your analysis jagabo!

What is line TBC?

What bitrate should I capture at if i want to fit a 1.5 hour video on a single DVD?

To burn the DVD, I was told to use eac3to's HdBr Stream Extractor to split that captured video into M2V and AC3, then join them in AVStoDVD and burn without reconversion. Is that right?

Why is it that when I capture the video there is jitter, but when I play the tape on TV through camcorder or VCR there is none?e

Also, for some reason my screenshots in VLC are not as sharp as yours.... maybe my video even plays better in your VLC than it does in mine?

[jmac698]

Try http://www.dvdstyler.org/en/

use MPEG and VOB files without reencoding

[FulciLives]

You don't want the MAX video bitrate to go over 8,000kbps if you will be using LPCM audio. If you are using AC-3 audio then even at the max bitrate of AC-3 you can safetly set the video bitrate to 9,000kbps

Some encoders, especially hardware encoders like the one you are using, will always peak a bit above the setting you put on them. So to be safe I would set the peak or max video bitrate at 8,000 and use AC-3 audio. The audio bitrate is up to you. Generally speaking 256kbps AC-3 is good enough. But like I said even if you max it to 448kbps (the max AC-3 bitrate for the DVD Video format) then 8,000kbps for video should be fine.

I think your device will only capture LPCM or MP2 (I just thought of this) so capture LPCM and either use that (in which case to be safe set the max video bitrate to 7,500kbps) or go with 8,000kbps for the video and later, after the capture, convert the LPCM audio to AC-3 format.

You do want to author on DVD without re-encoding. Some programs will accept MPEG files while others will only accept separate video and audio streams. As you found out there are various programs to mux and demux MPEG files.

If you go with 8,000 video bitrate with AC-3 then you will probably only get about 1 hour per DVD disc. This will give you the best quality. In fact if the Hauppauge can capture CBR for the video then do that at 8,000 with AC-3.

DVD discs are cheap and chances are your original videos are no more than 1 hour tapes so it should work out the way I said. Plus you get the best quality you can.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

P.S.
Any progress reports?