My TV Capture to SVCD Setup and Recommendations

[Devnull]

Is there is site that lists supported cards for PowerVCR? It can't find my Pinnacle Studio PCTV Pro.

[modeler_us]

Plant_Guy,

In the dialog box that mentions I frames and quality settings, did you change anything there?

no I did not.

I would reccommend installing all of the latest patches for the cyberlink software.

Also you list a AverTV stereo TV card. Is this based on the same components as the ATI Wonder Card? I'm not familiar but I have not worked with an AverTV card so I have no idea if my guide works with it.

Otherwise the only thing I could think of that might cause issues would be possibly a bad cable connection to your PC. When talking with my cable guy when he installed my cable modem he mentioned that cables have different bandwidth and that fatter is better as a basic rule. I could a bad connection causing some problems but I would first consider the patching the software.

Just some thoughts.

[Plant_Guy]

Modeler,

Since I had trouble with the capture, I re-installed the AverTV capture software with scheduler and set it to DVD resolution (720x480) using mpeg-1 compression. I then use Kwag's 2-disc templates and with AviSynth add some filters and Voila! An hour long TV show at 800MB/DVD quality! When the cable signal is noisy, though, filtering is tricky and time consuming. BTW, the card I have uses the BT878 chip. I just got my legal copy of PowerDVD, so I'll let you know how it goes after the weekend, and thanks for the suggestions.

TomG. - aka Plant_Guy

[ozmacccp]

Super Newbie questions:

- What's the deal with SVCD? I can burn DVD-R...should I just stick with that?

- Why 480X480? That's the normal aspect ratio of a TV or something? I thought you could get better results the higher you go. What is the normal cap size to use for TV anyway?

Thanks!
- dumb newbie

[susie]

.

[tomreedtoon]

I finally got WinVCR (from an eBay auction...thanks!) and its capture is terrific. (I have to uninstall WinDVD, though, since I have a Hollywood Plus DVD card.) It makes my ATI TV Wonder VE card do what I need it to do - capture TV shows. (I can barely fit one "Smallville" minus commercials on one 700 MB CD, using the advice from here. Thanks.)

However...that editing problem is still there. Part of it is the imprecise editing. You can only do a rough setting with the mouse. When you do the "step" with the buttons to move the start and end points, you can only bump 1/10 of a second. There doesn't seem to be any way to get finer resolution.

Mind you, I'm a broadcast engineer, and have access to frame-accurate BetaCam VCR's and a pro digital video file server at work. I'm used to frame-accurate edits (if you want to call 1/29.97 of a second accurate, which for audio often isn't.)

I'm not expecting that out of WinVCR, but the editing is crude. The final edit is so innacurate, I have to leave about a second of extraneous video (commercials) in the program to avoid cutting out any program segments by accident.

To you folks who know so much about digital video, is this the result of editing an MPEG-2 video stream? Is the nature of the file compression such that it's impossible to edit any closer? I don't currently have hard drive space enough to edit AVI files in VirtualDub, which does seem to be frame-acccurate.

Any suggestions or comments would be appreciated.

[davel]

Trying out Power VCR II with the patches and I get some intersting things happening. When I run power VCR I get no sound and notice it changes my audio mixed settings to mute. Also after applying the patch for titan tv I do not see the tab that is suppossed to come up in settings. I have also tried skunkwerk site and it states that it is shutdown and goto avs forum for new location but unable to find it.

I appreciate help in any of these areas.

[Buck9419]

I had tried Powervcr without your suggested patchs. I'll have to try it again with them so I can get the 480x480 resolution.

Powervcr can't tune in all the cable channels. I need a manual tuning feature and I didn't see one in the software. I have one of the cable system they call HRC. As the cable guy explained they shift all the channels some with this system. Problem is the automatic channel scan has trouble finding all of the channels.

I did have a random problem occur after trying Powervcr and Windvr(trial version). I randomly get a rumbling sound from the computer sound card now after booting into XP Pro. I didn't get this until I tried these. The newer version of the software for the Pinnacle TVPro still works except for the rumbling. Funny thing is the rumbling can start after booting into WinXP Pro, start sometime after you are in the system or stop after awhile. Very strange and annoying. I am using a Creative Labs soundblaster live value card. FYI, it's doing this after I uninstalled powervcr.

[macleod]

you might try out the 352x480 (NTSC) CVCD "standard". It (in my opinion) blows away the 480x480.

Regarding your audio problem, I had the same issue with mt ATI TV wonder card. I have to "click" through the different connections (CATV,TV, SVIDEO, USB, back to CATV) and then the sound comes back. A little glitch, but powervcr is the best I have seen in my experience. NO need to reencode either.

[lchiu7]

REGEDIT4

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\CyberLink\PowerVCR II]

"MaxRecSizeMB"=dword:00000fa0
"AudioPlayLine"=dword:000000a
"AudioRecLine"=dword:000000a
"AllVideoSize"="288#384 x 288#360 x 240#360 x 288#480 x 480#640 x 480#720 x 480#720 x 576#"

Basically the tweaks just set things correctly. They set the start volume and record volume at a max of 10 and set the maximum recording file size to 4000mb. And lastly they added 480 x 480 size to the list of video sizes. Then to top it all off cyberlink released an update in April that would allow you to schedule records with an online tv guide type interface called CyberEPG. That was just frosting on the cake. In addition the software came with a built in video trimmer which allows you to trim out commercials without re-encoding the whole file.

Well I tried those hacks using PowerVCR II 3.0 and a Hauppauge WinTV PCI card. I set my profile to be 2520 kbs and as I was recording I could see the image was stretched vertically as expected. Took the output file into Nero and disregarding the warnings (says non compliant video stream) burnt to SVCD. Problem is the file won't play on my Skyworth 1080P DVD player - I get streaks of color across the picture and it stutters. The Skyworth plays regular SVCD's created using Nero or TMPGENc fine

Is there some non compliant aspect of this stream?

Larry

[devnulllore]

How did you get it to keep the audio sync? Mine keep going off up to 15 secinds towards the middle of the capture.


~dev

[Stanley Bostitch]

How do you edit the registry?

[devnulllore]

I just cut and pasted the entries into a *.reg file and merged it.