SVCD & Low resolution?

[booboobubber]

This is real Newbie question. I can only capture my home movies at the moment at 352 x 288 resolution and am wondering whether it is posible to creat an SVCD from that resolution. I have made VCD's that look pretty good but the picture quality looks lower than the original VHS tape even when done as XVCD. I have read a lot of guides on this that have helped me create VCD & XVCD of my home Vid's. I have not tried to create an SVCD because from what I read in the guides I get the feeling my starting resolution is to low but I thought I'd ask just to be sure I've got it right. I'm planning to buy a new computer in the near future and would also like to ask which would be better a DVD burner or CDRW? My primary use for the burner would be for tranfering home videos off VHS to Disc. Also can anyone reccommend the best capture method/card for VHS? I want to be able to capture at the highest posibble quality for my presious home Vid's. Any advice would be appreciated.

[Poplar]

1. You can make SVCD with 352x288 resolution, your DVD player might play it. But there is no guarantee that it will be much better than VCD. Standard SVCD uses a resolution of 480X480(576). Why can't you capture at 353x576? It is not asking too much of your computer.

2. In my opinion, using DVD to transfer VHS is a little bit overkill. Remember this, you can never make your transfer better than VHS, which is not that good, to begin with. You can get it very close to original source. How close you can get depends on your skills and your equipment. I have seen DVDs transferred from VHS and they looked like crap. Most of us can only afford some entry-level capture cards, so set your expectations too high. SVCD should be good enough, if you know how to do it right. Having said that, DVD burner is the future. If they get price of DVD media much, much lower than they are now, I would like to get one.

3. Transfer method.
Tape --> Virtual Dub or AVI-IO -->Huffy or uncompressed AVIs --->
Avisynth + CCE --> Mpeg-2

[booboobubber]

Thanks for your reply poplar. At the moment I'm using my work computer to experiment with Video capture/edit/VCD which has a Dynalink TV card which I use for capture. I've found that the TV card can only capture resolution up 352x288. I have followed the guides on this site to the letter and have been able to produce good VCD'S but have found that the picture quality when played on my DVD player is lower than when I play the original VHS tape. So I thought it may be possible to acheive a picture quality which is very close to or the same as the source if I was to create a SVCD. Currently as I can not capture higher than 352x288 I felt that it probably would not work to go to SVCD to improve picture quality but I was unsure. I can't keep using the work computer for my video editing so I'm looking into buying my own computer. I want to acheive the best possible results when converting my VHS tapes to CD but I'm not rich so I don't want to make the mistake of going into debt for a computer with the best of everything if I will only acheive the same results as I would on a less expensive computer set up. I do find computer tech talk quite bewildering so I could quite easily get ripped off. Any advice will be very much appreciated.

[snowmoon]

svcd can be done at low resolution and it's better than VCD because of favorable bitrates, but SVCD really shines at it's native resolution of 480x480. You get both fields ( smooth motion ) and a much larger horozontal resolution that should be more than enough for even the best VHS. Remember that no matter what you will loose quality, the key is to recuse the ammount you loose.

1) Get a TBC if possible $$.
2) make sure your vid capture card is calibrated for whilt/black balance
3) always capture with the highest quality codec that your cpu/hd will support

Personally I like to bump up the saturation about 10% to give the color a little kick, just make sure not to make your capture dayglow by accident.

Good luck tinkering.

[booboobubber]

Thanks for your reply Snowman. What is TBC?
What would be the best type of capture card for capturing VHS?

[booboobubber]

After doing a search on this site I have found out What TBC stands for. TIME BASE CORRECTOR which keeps the video stream together & colour corrects the image. From what I have read it's a good thing to have if capturing VHS.
Thanks snowmoon for the advice.

[RoopeT]

SVCD @ 352x288 won't look any better than a XVCD @ 352x288 and the same bitrate. 352x288 just isn't enough to keep all the "VHS details".

Are you sure you can't capture at any higher resolution? According to http://www.dynalink.com.au/files/pdfs/bt878_specs_sheet.pdf you should be able to capture up to 768x576 resolution. Or can't just use a higher resolution because of an ancient CPU? If you have more than ~500 MHz Celeron, you should be able to captere at least 352x576 using PicVideo MJPEG codec.

Brooktree based card don't allow capturing @ full resolution when in overlay mode. Try capturing in VirtualDub, change "Overlay mode" to "Preview mode". You can also select "Hide when capturing", this brings down some CPU load. If you still can't capture at any higher resolution, you should try the generic Bt878 driver available @ http://btwincap.sourceforge.net

[booboobubber]

Thanks RoopeT. I've searched the office and found the box for the capture card. Its a Dynalink Tv tuner and Video Capture Card CPH051. The specs on the bax are as follows.
Image/video Capture
AVI Compatible
Yuv 4:2:2 Quality with RGB 32,24,15 Format
Supports Coax, Composite, S-Video
Full Screen (Up to 640x480) Capture Capability.

My source VHS is Pal and the Pal SVCD Res is 480 x576. I don't know whether it would be viable to try a NTSC SVCD considering my source is Pal.

[RoopeT]

When I saw your mail, I did a search for Dynalink TV cards, and Dynalink Tv tuner and Video Capture Card CPH051 was all I found so I guessed this has to be your card. Allthought the box says 640x480 resolution, the card can actually capture 768x576, as all Bt878 based cards. I guess they're mainly marketing the card for NTSC consumers, that's why the 640x480 statement.

If you can't capture @ xxx x 576, then it's a driver issue, try using the btwincap generic drivers. However, with these drivers the TV software that came with your card won't work anymore. For viewing TV use DScaler (even if you continue using the drivers you now have).

[RoopeT]

Try capturing with VirtualDub. Turn overlay mode off -> preview mode. Select custom resolution (352x576 will probably do as your source is VHS).

What OS are you running? I have a Terratec TV Value card based on the same Bt 878 chip as yours. Never had any problems capturing in Win98 using Terratec VfW drivers (Except had to swap fields before encoding). With WinXP I have to use WDM drivers, and the ones I have downloaded from Terratec site have been very buggy, so I switched to btwincap drivers in XP. Now I don't have to reboot to '98 for capturing anymore (I'm still keeping both OS's).

[booboobubber]

Thanks RoopeT. My operating system is Win 2000pro. My cpu is P4 1.5GHZ, Ram 512, Video card Nvidia TNT2, intel celeron 566MHZ, 40GB 7200. I don't know much about what makes a good computer so I don't know if the above spec's are good or bad. This is my work PC so as I mentioned before I need to buy my own. I don't know whether to get the same or whether I need better?

[RoopeT]

My cpu is P4 1.5GHZ, Ram 512, Video card Nvidia TNT2, intel celeron 566MHZ, 40GB 7200.

P4 1.5 GHz AND Celeron 566 MHz on a same computer? Not likely.

I Have myself a AMD Thunderbird 1,2 GHz, 256 Mb SDRAM, 40 Gb 7200 RPM IBM Hd + 60 Gb 5400 RPM Samsung Hd. I think you can capture and encode good quality SVCDs with any modern computer, you don't necessarily have to buy the most expensive packet available. Any processor over 1 GHz will do (inluding Celerons and Durons). Of course, the more you're willing to pay for your processor, the faster you will get your encoding done. However, 40 Gb HD is too small for capturing purposes. I would get 2 x 80 Gb, if I were buying a computer right now. 7200 RPM is of course somewhat faster than 5400, but I have had no problems capturing onto my 5400 drive.

256 Mb RAM is the absolute minimum for any video encoding (I will probably buy myself 256 Mb more).

[booboobubber]

As I said I don't really know what I'm talking about when it comes to computer specs. I got the info on my PC spec's from properties under my computer, probably not the right place to look. I thought intel celeron 566MHZ was the motherboard but I don't really know.
Am I understanding correctly, do you need to hard drives for video capture?

[RoopeT]

If it's a Celeron, where did you get the idea of having P4 1.5 GHz? A Celeron 566 MHz is a bit slow for full resolution capturing & encoding, but might do.

When capturing video you'll need a lot of HD space. If you capture using Huffuv lossless codec, you'll need > 500 Mb for 1 minute capture, so you'll need > 60 Gb for an 2 hour movie. That's the reason I'm using Picvideo MJPEG @ quality 19/20 myself, it "only" takes ~ 200 Mb / minute.

You don't have to have a separate HD for capturing, but it's faster capturing onto a different HD than where your OS is.

[snowmoon]

If your card is a bt8x8 you can alyways go out and get the universal drivers from sourceforge. They work great in my PC, no overlay support on VFW apps, but oh well. It supports up to 720x480 NTSC and the appropriate PAL resolutions too.

FYI: THey are not making Celeron P4's. They are just the P4 core with less cache. Overall they are a good deal.

For capturing you need either 1) fast CPU to encode realtime + software or 2) Lot's of HD space and time.

Personally I've always done 2 since I like to clean up the video before encoding. For option 2 you just need something like PicVideo MJPEG codec ( works up to 720x480 on a PII 300 ).

I recommend readin up on the capture "how-to's" since capturing to MJPEG or Huffyuv is covered under those guides.

[booboobubber]

Thanks a lot for the great feedback, I really appreciate it. Now I know I'm going to expose myself as being really stupid, but I'm still very bewildered by all the computer spec talk. As you know I want to buy a computer for home use as the work computer is being used as a server for four other PC's in the office so I shouldn't really be messing around with this stuff on it. Is there a web site that tells novices like me what specs a PC should have for doing video editing. I'm very cautious of computer salesman these days as I was ripped off about five years ago when I purchased my last home PC. Shortly after I made my purchase I worked with a guy that was a real computer person and he let me know my computer was a peice of rubbish. Unfortunately I have lost contact with him now.

[booboobubber]

Someone has just suggested this web site http://www.dell.com.au This is the Australian Dell website as thats where I live. Does any one know if something there selling here would be good for Video editing?

[Greg12]

stay with VCD, i've used SVCD at a low bitrate and it is terrible!