Sometimes they're good, sometimes they're not so good..

[fisheez]

OK, so I do a lot of music video capture/encoding and sometimes they're really decent looking/sounding and sometimes they look like poo.

I've been tweaking/oc'ing my PC and video in big big ways the last few days with no real effect (as to video quality that is).

What can I tweak/optimize/OC/whatever to help video capture/encode quality? My main problem is blockiness in video - yucky icky blocky videos aren't visually appealing.

Would tweaking/optimizing DirectX settings help any? I imagine that they would, but what do I change?

OK, my system is:

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Intel CeleronII 1ghz (oc'd to 1.3ghz - cooled by Thermaltake Volcano 5 heatsink/fan)
ASUS TUSL2-C mobo (FSB oc'd to 129.9mhz)
Intel 815EP chipset
Award Medallion 6.0 BIOS
512mb PC-133 SDRAM (cooled by Thermaltake active memory cooler w/fan)
PNY GEForce3 ti200 video card (oc'd to 245/515mhz clock/memory - cooled by Thermaltake Crystal Orb - also have stock fan attached and blowing over rest of card)
SB Live! 5.1 sound
ATI TV-Wonder VE video capture/TV tuner card
Western Digital 60gb 7200rpm 2mb cache IDE
Linksys LNE100TX ethernet
2 Optical Drives (CDRW & DVD-ROM)
1.44 floppy
Enlight 300watt power supply
Other cooling: 2 extra chassis fans & 1 PCI slot fan/exhaust
also have cut/tied/wrapped/tucked away all floppy/IDE cables
And all of it's crammed into a cheap-o Enlight mid-tower case
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Really, *anything* that might help capture/encoding quality. I'm using TMPGenc for the encoding and ATI's MMC7.0 for capturing - I know that VDub is more revered in the PC video world but it's a lot harder to use and doesn't like to play with the TV Wonder. Like the tweak to capture 640x640 SVCD MPEG-2 for ATI cards is there one that'll do AVI and play nicely with the HuffyUV codec?

I'm capturing to a clean partition every time (no fragmentation) and have a hardware startup that disables everything unnecessary for the video capture. Of course I also have the latest drivers and updates for everything in my system. ..mmm.. using Win98SE.

OK, if you made it this far in my long and drawn out post and have any ideas then by all means let me know.

*Any* help on settings/tweaking/whatnot would be SO appreciated - 'ya might even get fame and popularity by being mentioned on my stupid web site.

Thanks in advance.

-fisheez-

[pharlap]

have you installed new intel drivers and super ata 100 intel accelarator

[fisheez]

Yep. I've been very thorough with all drivers and updates. I even went through all the motherboard resources in the device manager and updated those individually.

[binkyaut]

Just curious as to why you are only doing your captures in 640X640 - is there some limitation to the broadcast on digital cable? IF your already re-encoding in TMPGeng, why not go 704X480 or 720X480, and bump the bitrate waaay up? It might also help to capture I-frames only for your mpeg2 capture.

I'm not sure about MMC7.0, but I have been able to capture to AVI using the HuffyUV codec in MMC7.6 (I think that's what I have). HuffyUV just seems to take all day to re-encode though. :\

I guess the real question is whether your captures look like blocky/crappy before you send them to TMPEG or after.

So I guess give those ideas a shot and see if they help!

[fisheez]

The ATI card I have has some sort of limitation built in that won't allow anything over 240 height. I could go 640x240 or 720x240, but you can imagine what that looks like.

I can capture to AVI using HuffyUV just fine in MMC, but..:

I can't do 640x640, I was just using the setting as an example of something I wish I could do. There's a registry tweak out there for SVCD capturing that'll allow that setting, so I figure there should be one for AVI, too. My original captures all have to be in 320x240 if I don't want them looking distorted.

Why wouldn't I go bigger with HuffyUV? Hey, I've only got a 60 gig drive and I do have some stuff loaded..

[flaninacupboard]

ati is wdm, so use showshifter. i love this program (simply because it works, unlike anything else!!) cap at 480X480 for svcd's, and 352X480 for VCD. if its going to vcd or svcd just use mjpeg, as huffyuv is an overkill quality wise.