Real-time encoder, Videostudio or PowerVCr II?

[Anonymous65]

I have been using Videostudio to capture real-time mpeg-2 video at 352x480 resolution @ 4Mb/sec. The Ligos encoder will actually make a artifact "free" capture at this bit rate (max quality setting).

Has anybody tried the PowerVCR II for real-time mpeg-2 captures? I'll give it a try shortly, but I'm intersted in hearing from others that might use Powervcr for mepg captures.

I did try Nanocosmos "DVR" program, and its performance can't even come close to that of the Ligos Gomotion encoder used in Videostudio.

Now that you can get a 1.5 GHz P4 CPU for just over $100, my guess is that software encoders, especially real-time, will become popular. Get a cheap TV tuner card and the right software, and make DVD quality captures in real-time without any special hardware encoders or space consuming AVI captures.

[PhArAoH]

I have tried PowerVCR II and to be honest I wasn't happy with the quality of MPEGs it produced.
IMO, on a scale 1 to 10 ( 1 been very poor, 10 excellent quality video) PowerVCR II would score 6.

[Anonymous65]

Hi.

Can you compare that to something else? Tmpeg, Ligos, and what were the problems, artifacts, blurry image, frame drops, ??

I'll give Powervcr a test soon, but I have to install the WDM drivers and uninstall Ulead to make sure they don't interfere with each other. I have had problems with WDM drivers before, so I might be in for a long night to check it out.

[PhArAoH]

Well, TMPGEnc is the best encode I have ever use and believe me, I have tried them all (incuding CinemaCraftEncoder and Panasonic Encoder). The PowerVCR II doesn't even come close to TMPGenc. Keep in mind that quality is subjective. What I find bad quality video might actually be acceptable for some people.
Power VCR II has lots more artifacts, no frame drops however. The only time I found it usefull was when I encoded some cartoons from VHS tape for my son. On top of that I experienced problems during start-up. It wasn't able to recognize video signal from my camcorder and gave me some unusual error messages. I really got fed up with it and removed it from my system.
Another real-time encoder you might come accross is Wincoder. I suggest you keep away from it for the time being. However, it has a lot of potential for future versions. It wasn't even able to create compliant MPEG1 files.

Please note that these are my personal experiences and other people might disagree with me. But generaly speaking, real-time software encoders have got a long way to go before they're widely accepted as standard tools for video conversion.

I have the following:
Pentium 4, 1.4 GHz
128 RAM
40GB HD
Windows XP Pro
Sony D8 camcorder attached to Frewire PCI card

[kwag]

PhArAoH:

Ditto on the WinCoder.

The quality is very good, but the mpeg produced is not compliant.
I'll keep grabbing with VirtualDub, filtering, and frameserving to TMPEG.

I've called tech support, because I own WinCoder, and I tried to explain to them the problems and I guess they didn't know what I was talking about. I quit using the product about 3 months ago, when I gave up with the bugs of un-compliancy that it has.

Right now TMPEG 2.53 Plus is far above anything else. At least for me.

kwag

[Anonymous65]

Oh, I totally agree, Tmpgenc is the best off-line encoder there is. However, saving time, and not making VCD or SVCD's in real time (only hardware can do this with quality in real-time), making DVD video from VHS at a high bit rate, I do find Ligos Gomotion perfectly fine for real-time captures. I did not see any difference in doing the capture in real-time and doing it off-line with the Ligos encoder at 352x480 @ 4Mb/sec.

Obviously, making a SVCD (480x480 @2.5Mb/sec) using real-time capture is a problem. Off-line encoding looks quite a bit better as far as artifatcs go. I was suprised how "good" the VCD was in real time. The problem is that ANY VCD made from 352x240 captured video looks poor. You have to capture 352x480 to encode good looking VCD video, and there is no way to set the capture card to 352x480 and make the software encode a VCD file in real-time. The software should have the option of doing the 2:1 vertical reduction during encoding, that would make the quality of the VCD much better.

Anyway, I'm looking into making low resolution DVD files at high bit rates, not VCD and SVCD files. For VCD and SVCD creation, only off-line software encoding and hardware encoding works good.

[homerpez]

We forget so soon about CCE.

Anyway, since I believe the topic was on real-time encoders (as you capture), I have in fact used this "Power VCR II"... I also wasn't truly impressed.

I've tried others (ATI MMC), and all seems to have severe limitations, most are so demanding of the CPU that it's impossible to maintain a good capture quality and keep up.

I can only say that perhaps direct-to-MPEG isn't the way to go at all... if you ever capture Huffy-AVI with Virtualdub, and make THAT your source for any other encoder, you will never go back to on-the-fly MPEG captures again.

My $0.02 again.

[Anonymous65]

Just my 2c, but when you can get a 2 or 3GHz CPU, there will be no need to capture to AVI and then encode to mpeg. If so, you will spend 1:1 on the capture, and then 1:0.5 on the encoding. Why not just do it all at 1:1 the first time? Of course, it will take a few more month before I get a 3 GHz CPU :)

[Anonymous65]

I have tested the PowerVCR II Deluxe, and the installation went without any problems. Also, running the program was easy without any crashes. The quality of 640x480 captures at 4 Mb/sec mpeg-2 was pretty good. The video looked softer than the Ligos encoder, even with all filtering turned off. Strangely, I could only set the quality control at 3 out of 8 without dropping frames. I wonder what CPU you need to capture at quality setting 8?

Still, it will not take over Ulead Videostudio 6 for making VCD, SVCD or DVD video. There were some problems I could not fix.

- no 352x480 resolution setting
- no control over 44.1 and 48 KHz audio
- no control over interlace and deinterlace (default is deinterlace everthing)

Otherwise, I thought it ran smooth without any glitches. For high bit rate captures, it did a pretty good job. I did try to capure at 720x480 at 4 Mb/sec, but the video had artifacts during motion. I guess a 3 GHz CPU is needed

[TRILIGHT]

Has anyone used a real-time MPEG encoder that they were pleased with? I don't think software is the way to go for real-time but is there a hardware real-time encoder that anyone has considered to produce quality output?

[Mirror_Image]

is there a hardware real-time encoder that anyone has considered to produce quality output?

What is your "not-to-exceed" price?

[zorinsmarket]

I use a Dazzle DVC2 for my realtime Mpeg2 encoding and it looks great. If I want to put the movie or what not on a CD-R I use TMPGenc to cut, then Nero to burn. If DVD is what I want, I just burn it to DVD-R's and viola, the picture is great.(this is just my experience with hardware encoding, before I would just use TMPGenc due to its stable software, but a good cpu is needed also).

good luck,
Zorin

[tana]

I use PowerVCR II Deluxe to capture Star Trek Enterprise and Smallville. I have a ATI TV WONDER, and I've tried ATI's MMC capture program and the quality on it sucks compared to Power VCR. I've tried Virtual Dub, but I could not get it to record at 640x480 for some reason, and I had a lot of frames dropping anyways. I can capture at 640x480 with PowerVCR with quality set at 9Mb/s and quality control at 3. I think someone mentioned that they could only set it to 3 out of 8? I noticed that problem also before I upgraded my version of Powervcr in windows XP, but once I upgraded, the highest quality is 3, not 8. One thing I found annoying about PowerVCR II was that it's set to split the video files into 600MB chunks and when it did this, it would miss out on a second or two of video from the capture and I found it really annoying to glue the pieces back together. Until I was smart enough to do a regedit and found the internal settings for the program and told it to make each video file size at least 4GB, and it solved my problem. It seems like people here say that tmpg is much better, but I haven't tried that yet, but the quality of video I get with PowerVCR II seems to be very good. I would like to compare the video quality with someone else who has captured with tmpg and I can show you what I get with PowerVCR II. I encode all my mpeg2 into divx 5.0 format. Drop me a line if you want to see a sample of my recordings.


-tana-

[voduseks]

Ouestion for tana.

I use PowerVCR II Deluxe and it works fine for me(on my 1.2G Athlon). But i dont like 600MB limitation of one video file.
Tana, can you be more specific which file did you open, with which program and what did you change?

[SJohn]

Ouestion for tana.

I use PowerVCR II Deluxe and it works fine for me(on my 1.2G Athlon). But i dont like 600MB limitation of one video file.
Tana, can you be more specific which file did you open, with which program and what did you change?

Check here:
http://207.232.102.64/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=8&t=000501

[Anonymous65]

I migth help, even thought I don't have the software installed at the moment. But, it will be under current user or local machine in the registry. (type regedit in the Run command under Start). Go down to Software, and find the company that makes PowerVCR, or it might even list powerVCR. In one of the keys it will say something like "rec limit, chunck size" or something to that effect. I believe the default data value is 600, meaning 600KB. So change this to 4000 if you want to use a 4 gig limit.

WARNING: don't mess around in the registry is you don't know what you're doing. It can stop your PC from working.
Someone might send you a copy of the registry setting so you can simply double-click on the reg file, and it will update your settings.

[tana]

Here's what you need to do to to change PowerVCR II's 600MB file size to whatever limit you want, well whatever your file system is limited to. I don't think NTFS has a limit, but FAT does, although I've never bothered to try and find the size limit. I'm using NTFS.

Click on "Start" then select "Run" and type in "regedit" Then find the following.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER
+Software
+Cyberlink
+PowerVCR II
-MaxRecSizeMB 258 (600)

Change MaxRecSizeMB to whatever value you want. Double click on it and it will allow you to change the value, switch the setting to Decimal unless you know your HEX numbers pretty well. I set it to 4200 in Decimal or 1068 in HEX and that allows me to record 1hr of video without PowerVCR splitting the file up. I set my resolution to 640x480, MPEG 2 quality at 9MB/s and quality setting of 3.

Now look for

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
+Software
+Cyberlink
+PowerVCR II
-MaxRecSizeMB

Do the same setting to this as you did above in HKEY_CURRENT_USER.
Now you're all set and you can do a test record if you want. But what I found with PowerVCR II Deluxe's player and video trimmer is that it does not like working with files over 2GB, well that's the closest I ever tried narrowing it down to. When you try to play any video file over 2GB it won't allow you to advance the movie ahead through the quick scroll bar, which is very annoying when you want to avoid commercials, and you pretty much cannot use the video trimmer either to trim out commercials and merge the scenes together either. But that wasn't too important to me because I never liked PowerVCR's video trimmer, I thought it kinda sucked and wasn't very accurate or precise in selecting the sequence of video you want to cut. I then found a new program (M2-Edit Pro), a hell lot better for video trimming and merging which was a lot more accurate, you can be precise within 1/100th of a sec and you can enter the time by changing the values, whereas with PowerVCR you could only use the damn scroll bar, or push a silly button to advance it which was very unprecise. M2-Edit Pro also didn't care how large the video file is. I now also use M2-Edit Pro to watch the recordings as well if I just want to watch a recording without archiving it and I just skip past the commercials. Anyway, hope this helps out. Be advised though, don't go fooling around the registry and changing values at whim, you might find out on your next boot that your computer no longer comes up. But my instructions above should be pretty safe to follow :wink:

[voduseks]

Thanks to all!!!
I'm starting capture in few moments.

voduseks

[Scobo]

I've tried a few real-time MPEG encoders such as NanoDVR, PowerVCR and Wincoder. I would agree that the Ligos encoder is by far the best in terms of quality. In fact, it's the only one I can capture to SVCD res of 480x576 (PAL) without dropping loads of frames.
Then again, my processor is only a Duron 750Mhz and my capture board a WinTV Go.
Off-line encoding of AVI files does produce better quality at low bitrates but the difference is less noticeable the higher the bitrate you use. I use 5000kbps and this gives near DVD quality in my opinion.
The down side to using your processor for encoding in real-time is that other parts of your system can interrupt the capture and cause dropped frames. For this reason, I shut down all other non-essential software before capturing.

[Anonymous65]

I wonder why Ligos does not sell the Gomotion VFW and WDM real-time capture encoder? It is the best real-time encoder, and it comes with many video editing packages, but NOT as a stand alone product. It would be a great plug-in for vdub or any other simple capture programs like Vidcap32.

[SHS]

skittelsen I like point this out to you soft realtime mpeg codec can't do realtime VBR you stuck with CBR mode, Have you ever try building real 704x480(NTSC)576(PAL) or 720x480(NTSC)576(PAL) MPEG2 min of 4MBit/sec DVD disk and play it back in you Home Player?.
Oh your bit off with 3 GHz CPU more like 4GHz is need

[Anonymous65]

Ulead VS6 can do VBR mpeg-2 in real-time, no problem. Also, I see no need to capture 720x480 for DVD, I use 352x480, and it looks just as good as the pey-per-view movies I get on satellite. So, recording 352x480 @ 4 Mb/sec VBR or CBR (I like CBR better because it's easier to control the size) is possible with a 1.5GHz P4, which I currently do with UVS6. There are no noticable motion artifacts with a CBR of 4 Mb/sec.

Oh, the 4 Mb/sec 352x480 CBR plays perfectly as a SVCD or DVD on my Apex DVD player.

[SHS]

Which Apex DVD player is it skittelsen?.
Do plan on put up a short clip?.

[Anonymous65]

I have the Apex 660.

I currently do not have Ulead VS6 installed because it could not capture above 4 gig without crashing. If I have any clips captured with it, they are long and not short. But, I'll look and see if I burned a copy for testing on a CD-RW that I have not erased yet.

I believe UVS6 replaced the Ligos gomotion mpeg engine with their own mpeg engine.