Ludicrous captured file sizes

[Buggerlugs]

Whats the best way to capture a good quality composite video stream and stereo line-in, and not use 38mb per min of harddisk space?

I can`t use virtuadub because it don`t like my winxp wdm driver! wahh!

[Barnabas]

A hardware encoder card.

[liquid217]

use a codec like huffyuv or mjpeg when capturing,

On a side note, your problem with virtualdub can be fixed by getting the vfw wdm wrapper...located here..
http://faq.arstechnica.com/link.php?i=714

[Barnabas]

The "wrapper" will only let you capture in 352 x 288 max, so not that best choice at all. Try using a generic BT* driver with your capture card.

[Buggerlugs]

I`m actually using the Genius Video wonder 2 WDM driver for windows xp, primarily because the haupage one caused my pc to instantly reset itself everytime i tried to use the card, and the generic BT878 refuses to let my Haupage card pickup the composite video.

Now i`ve got it working, i`m pretty impressed with the overall picture quality. It certainly beats vcdhelp`s screenshots in its guides hands down. I`ve just hooked it upto my SKY Decoder with a scart with composite/svhs out and stereo phono left and right out, wired it up to 20 meters of 6 core alarm wire and took it upstairs. Sound quality is superb through my sblive line-in.

I`ve tried using all the recent software i can get my hands on, Power vcr2, descaler and showshifter all of which produce excellent quality playback but at like 38mb per minute.

So basically, if i want to record a full film off sky,

1. What sort of software do i need?
2. What capture resolution/ codec do i need to capture in to not use up tons of space? MJPEG is ridiculously harddisk hungry. And i`ve only got 28gb remaining on my drive. Surely thats enough to record 2 hours of video?????


What i need to know is, if i`m going to be capturing a full film from sky

[liquid217]

The "wrapper" will only let you capture in 352 x 288 max, so not that best choice at all. Try using a generic BT* driver with your capture card.

Thats's not entirely true, i capture at full frame (720x480) using the wrapper. although analogue data cannot produce this resolution, nevertheless i can capture it.

[Barnabas]

I use the driver btwdmdrvinstaller5.3.0.zip with my BT card. It works fine in VirtualDub without any wrapper needed.

Without buying a hardware encoder, I would use the PicVideo codec and select 19 for quality. I capture at 480 x 480 in virtual dub. I just caputred a 54 minute Laserdisc with those settings and the file is just under 10 Gigs. The Huffy codec needs MUCH more HD space, and while the quality is a little better, it's not all that much better for the space used. ShowShifter has the PicVideo codec. If you use the settings I just gave, you would have enough HD space for 2 hours of video.

Using my Hauppauge WinTV PVR USB, 57 minutes of Video in SVCD format take up only 1 Gig of HD space, which can be burned to a 99 minute disk and looks very good when played om my 52" TV.

[Buggerlugs]

That wrapper link isn`t working, any idea where else i can get it from?

[liquid217]

well i just retried my link and it worked for me, On a side note, the wrapper is only needed if your going to use virtualdub since it is a vfw based program. There are many good capture programs that work with wdm based drivers. One good program that many use is iuvcr
http://www.iulab.com/

with this program, you can also select different codecs for captuing,
Barnabas was correct on the settings to use with picvideo's mjpeg
www.jpg.com a setting of 19 will give you very good quality, you can lower it to get more room, but you begin to sacrifice quality.

[Mirror_Image]

38MB/min isn't too outrageous if you want a decent quality capture. I cap at 352x480 MPEG-2 with a bitrate of 4800kbit/sec (plus 224kb/sec audio) and it racks up to roughly 37MB/min, or only 2.2GB/hour. Less than 5GB for a 2 hour movie (actually, a bit less than that, as it's VBR with a 4800 max).

Let's go at it from another direction:

How small do you want your movie files for (just to pick a number) a 2 hour movie? After you capture, do you intent to burn to VCD, SVCD, DVD, DivX?

[Barnabas]

That wrapper link isn`t working, any idea where else i can get it from?

The wrapper link worked for me too. The file is only 33k total.

[Buggerlugs]

I`m wanting to know what resolution to capture SKY (UK PAL) so that at the end of the day i can get as close as possible to a (cough) expert dvd rip and fit my finished film on 1 or 2 700mb cdrs (depending on film length) in divx502 2 pass format.

[Buggerlugs]

installing the inf of that wrapper won`t **** up anything will it?

[liquid217]

well there is much argument in the video world about that is the basic resolution of analogue data. most will agree that it is AT LEAST 352x576 for pal. That is a standard resolution for a dvd (half D1). Full D1 resolution is 720x576, which is also dvd standard. With the Half-D1, you can fit more video onto one disk, with it being good quality. (Assuming that we are talking about putting this on a dvd-r)

[Buggerlugs]

okay i`ve been playing with IUVCR, capturing directly to Divx501 single pass Quality setting at 480x360 with PCM cd quality sound (which i convert to mp3 128k with virtuadub after capture.

I`m getting about 7.6mb divx avi per minute which works out to 684mb for 90mins which is halfway to getting where i want it.

The only thing is, this is 4.3 aspect ratio (full screen), so how would I capture to 16.1 widescreen when i`m capturing 4.3? (if that makes any sense?) or could I indeed capture a 16.1 widescreen film capturing off sky WS ?

Thoughts people?