Which Capture Method will give better results?

[RobDMB]

I just recently got a hauppauge tv card. My question is would it yield better results to use the wdm wrapper so i could use a program like virtual dub or would i be better off just using the wdm driver and using a program like iuvcr. I just want to know which will give me the best quality with fewest dropped frames. Here are my systems specs, Thanks.

Pentium 4 1.7 gig
256 rdram
60 gig harddrive
Windows xp pro

[Sefy]

As an owner of an Hauppage WinTV card, I can tell you that the best is to use the VFW drivers instead of WDM (if you have 98 you got a choice) as they provide better stability for programs which do not support WDM.

[Craig Tucker]

I dont own a happauge, I have an AIW 7500. I used to use Vdub for my captures under windows98, but when I upgraded to XP I started to have a lot of problems and so decided to give IUVCR a try. I'm glad I did.

With vdub I could capture at 352x288 huffy and would drop 1 frame every 2 or 3 minutes. at 704x576 I would drop 1 or 2 frames every second.

With IUVCR I can capture 704x576 uncompressed thats 20Mb per sec without a single frame drop. I can also capture to huffy at same res without a single frame drop.

I just captured an 80 minute file at 704x576 with huffy compression, (thats a 45Gb file) without dropping a single frame and that was from a VHS tape. The quality is superb.

So IUVCR certainly gets my vote for use with the AIW 7500.

Craig

[dishstaller]

Craig, thanks for the informative info...will have to give it a try. You stated that the capture was 45 gigs, what program do you use to encode and how long does it take? Are you making VCDs or SVCDs? Thanks, Andy

[Shabubu]

I am using a WinTV PVR on WinXP. And hauppage has very nicely built a VFW wrapper as an integral part of they're drivers. This means you cannot connect to a WDM cap program for some reason (this is PVR drivers as they haven't released a WDM version for this card yet).

VFW cap programmes tend to be more mature, I personally adore virtualdub for capping, if you don't mind being unable to change channels without using the TV Cards program then everything should be dandy.

If your capping from tape there is technically no need to go above 352x576 (thats the 'res' of VHS). The winTv inputs at 640x576 anyway so that's the ABSOLUTE maximum you should cap at. (NB the 576 is pal, it's 480 for NTSC).

On that system you shouldn't have any prob with dropped frames if you use a decent capture codec (Huffyuv or Picvideo) and cap in YUV. (I'm doing it at 480x576 with both on a P3 750 and a 40gb 7200rpm cap drive, and yes my cap drive is a partition of the system drive).

[Craig Tucker]

Dishstaller

I use TMPGEnc, I make VCD's and I can't remember how long it took to encode, I just left it running.

Craig