Quick/Dirty Capturing: MPEG-4?

[Nobi]

The primary reason I bought a capture card was to have a "poor man's Tivo" - recording of TV shows, and converting old VHS tapes.

I have about 120 gigs of hard disk space for storing video as well as blank CD/DVD media if the need arises. Basically, I'm not in search of a high-quality, DVD-purpose encoder; just one that has good quality and small file sizes. Of course, the option to convert to VCD/DVD would be good.

I've tried the MJPEG codec, but its disk space usage is too extreme. The DivX codec is good, but it has the annoying lag/freezing when fast-forwarding/rewinding/scanning.

Microsoft's MPEG4 format looks quite good, and very small (150-170KB/sec). I haven't found much info on this codec, so my questions are:

- Can this codec be converted to VCD/DVD?
- What's the difference between MPEG4-v1 and MPEG4-v2?
- Anything worth mentioning from personal experience?

[easydvd]

I've used versions 2 and 3 for a couple of captures. I think it's a great capture codec at small res.......say 320x240. I had some frame dropping at 352x480 with it. Set the encode rate to 6MBS and smoothness to 60-65 and at 320x240 that will give you about 12-15GB per minute of capture without any noticeable artifacts. After editing out the commercials I get a filesize of about 625MB for 45 minutes of video with a 192KB soundtrack.

For converting to SVCD......try the Morgan MJPEG codec set to 85, less lossy than picvideo and doesn't take as much space as Huffy, but will give you a totally decent capture.


Edit everything in virtualdub and then frameserve to either TMPG or CCE. I like CCE since it's so much faster than TMPG with a VBR mpeg2 encode. 45 minutes is nice with the mpeg4 codecs because you can encode without any further re-compression to your source.


e-mail me if you want and I'll send you a set of detailed instructions to cap and frameserve a mpeg4 vid

[Thorn]

The lag in divx files is caused the the keyframe interval. If you decrease the number of frames between each keyframe, the seektime to the next keyframe will be decreased.

Keep in mind you can't get optimum quality while capturing to a very compressed format. For watch-once material, by all means this won't be a problem. For stuff to be converted to vcd or other medium later, the better the quality you start with, the better quality the final product will be.

Also remember that microsoft's mpeg4 codecs are similar to the divx codec. Actually the old Divx 3.xx codec was based on it. The new one (v4-v5) was written from scratch, but it's also based on the same mpeg4 standard that microsoft used. Essentially, since they use the same technology you'll see similar quality at similar bitrates. Just don't ever encode to ASF, WMV, RM or any other closed format because you'll never get it out without a hassle.