Anyone using ATI TV to capture?

[bganthis]

I have been fooling around with it and there are SO many CUSTOM settings for AVI capture. I don't know which is best for capturing my VHS so I can make normal VCDs. My DVD players wont do SVCD.

I want the best possible settings to capture from my VHS via the TV TUNER COAX input on the AIW card.

Anyone familliar with the AIW Capture software ver 7.1?

Thanks guys

[AlanCake]

Hi

I've got the same card and have been pretty much doing the same kind of stuff with it as you - converting VHS to VCD.

I spent a good deal of time trying different settings. Initially I used a custom setting with a standard VCD size 352 x 288 (PAL) with a bitrate of 2500kb (any higher than that and my Pioneer player goes coogat).

So then I gets to thinking lets try and get the best quality I can here. So I tried all different combinations of bitrates and sizes. Eventually I started capturing to an AVI file using the Huffy lossless codec. The deal with this is that it is a smaller file than a traditional AVI and yet no quality is lost.

After a while, and I do mean a while, I compared the AVI converted mpg file with the one I captured straight from the card at 2500 - the difference was so imperceptibly slight that I reckoned there was no point. So now I just caputure straight from the MMC 7.1 at 2500 and the quality is pretty good. Easily watchible, which I suppose is the bottom line.

Kind regards

Alan

[bungle]

I have used ATI TV Wonder VE win Multimedia Centre (MMC) 7.1 on W98SE. MMC isn't a great product for capturing AVI, there are many other cheap or free AVI capture programs. I use iuVCR, which is excellent.

Also, ATI told me that the MMC 7.1 won't capture an AVI greater than 2Gb (the AVI limit) - although I've never tested this.

There are links from this site that provide in depth discussions on the 'best' capture sizes for VCD, but briefly:

Horizontal - don't capture wider than you are going to encode (352 for VCD). This is because for analogue signals, the hardware converts samples of the signal into the desired pixel width. Capturing more pixels horizontally and then resizing later won't do any better than the hardware can do itself! I just takes up more room on your hard disk

Vertical - Capturing both interlaced fields can help produce a sharper picture, so 480 is better than 240 (576 is better than 288 for PAL).
This is because a TV picture is made from lines not pixels. Capturing 480 (576 for PAL) gives you the option of passing the captured video through editing software (like VirtualDub) to 'clean' ready for encoding. The software should do a better job of reducing the height without noticible loss of quality than not capturing half of the picture.

VHS Captures are noisy (i.e. they can produce large variations between frames) and VHS isn't a high quality source to start with, which makes encoding an acceptable quality VCD difficult. Capturing 352x480 will give VirtualDub a better chance of reducing noise effectively, whilst retaining sharpness.

Before I climb off my soap-box, the other important consideration is the CODEC used for capture. I use PicVideo MJPEG Quality 18, which uses about 4Gb/hr. HuffYUV, or PicVideo with a higher Quality setting, will improve the quality, but you will need a fast hard disk to keep up with the capture (mine isn't very fast!).

Remember that the reason there is so much information about making VCDs on the internet is because there is no single definitive way to capture and encode to produce high quality VCDs. It's mainly trial and error.

Good Luck

PS I have read AlanCake's response and he is right, to a point ( ). If your coax connection yields a clean signal then this method is great. I have used MMC 7.1 to capture directly to MPEG-1 (352x288, constant bit rate, 2500Mbps) and I got over 3 hours in a 4Gb file. I then converted to VCD using FlaskMPEG to reduce the bitrate to 1150 without losing too much quality from the original capture - unfortunately for me, my signal isn't great. Therefore my captures benefit from 'cleaning' with VirtualDub, making AVI capture better for me. I know I should probably improve the source signal rather than clean afterwards (as this is nearly always better), but my excuse it that I got into making VCDs by using existing bits and bobs in the house.

[bganthis]

WOW,

Thanks for all the info guys. I am still experimenting.

One problem I have been having is: When I make the VCD with NERO I have been noticing that sometime the audio sync is off but a little. Kinda like watchinng Kung FU Theater. Any reason that this happens? Is there a setting?