hardware mpeg2 encoding cards

[wir98bjb]

Dear community,

I am looking for a fair priced video capture solution that can encode mpeg2 hardware based. After a few days of playing around with my AOpen GF4 Ti4200 which has Video-In I found that capturing uncompressed 720x576 frames just blows up my hd (besides the system won't allow file sizes over 4GB).
I would like to capture analog material at DVD resolution and at the same time compress it. Since it's meant to end up on DVD I thought encoding it directly in MPEG2 format would do good.
Now, what would be the best solution? Getting a software that takes the WDM-Driver and encodes the incoming data (and at a rate up to 8000kbps) in real time? Or would a hardware solution do better?

any hints are greatly appreciated

Steffen

[Anonymous65]

If you have a fast PC, then real-time high bitrate software mpeg encoding is fine. However, for VCD and SVCD creation, real-time software does not do a great job. Then, you might think of getting a hardware based encoder, like the WinTV PVR-250 or the ADS if you need to use the USB port.

[ItsMe]

Firstly in your profile you state that you are using windows XP. XP does allow file sizes above 4GB, check to see if your hard drive is using the NTFS file system. If it is not you should convert it.

I have tried a couple of hard- and software encoding solutions and after being dissapointed by the Hauppage PVR 250 which supports hardware encoding I bought a Vidac VMagic card (http://www.vidac.com) . Since then I have never looked back. Vidacs cards are not cheap but they do what they are supposed to do and they do it well.

[wir98bjb]

You're right, I am using Fat32. So the cheapest solution would be to turn my file system into NTFS and capture uncompressed (or light compressed) AVI? I would probably end up with an 38GByte capture file but if tmpgenc supports these file sizes it would be alright.

thanks

Steffen

[ItsMe]

The cheapest solution would indeed be to convert to NTFS and capture to AVI. You might want to download the lossless Huffyuv codec which will lightly compress your captures without loosing any quality.

[SingSing]

I capture my camcorder video to high bitrate mpeg2 ( 5000 kbps )
with ATI AIW 128, then re-encode to SVCD. The result is
pretty good.

The capture video is normally a bit dull, you can
crank up the contrast and color on the capture or TMPenc.

I think ATI AIW type card is about $100 when on sales.

[Graham T]

I capture my camcorder video to high bitrate mpeg2 ( 5000 kbps )
with ATI AIW 128, then re-encode to SVCD. The result is
pretty good.

The capture video is normally a bit dull, you can
crank up the contrast and color on the capture or TMPenc.

I think ATI AIW type card is about $100 when on sales.

Hi Sing

What version ATI AIW 128 are you using (16,32 ETC.), and are you using MMC, Which version 7.??.

What settings have you found best to capture at, avi, mpeg2 ??

When converting with TMPGenc how do you alter the colour and contrast?

I am pretty green at this and have an ATI AIW 128 16mb card and have been trying to capture from a camcorder but my results are poor so any help you can give me would be appreciated.

[BodyMaker]

@ its me, That Vidac link takes you to a hand label site lol
do you have the correct site ?

[Leon8]

I am interested in the Vidac capture card. Could you give us a little more detail, since the site is in German I believe. http://www.vidac.de

Does it do hardware mpeg of AVI files?

Have you compare with Vitec DCM?

What software does it come with?

What is approximate cost?

Where can you order it?

Where can you see same samples.

Thanks,

Leon

[ItsMe]

@ its me, That Vidac link takes you to a hand label site lol
do you have the correct site ?

Oops. it should read .de not .com

www.vidac.de

[ItsMe]

I am interested in the Vidac capture card. Could you give us a little more detail, since the site is in German I believe. http://www.vidac.de

Does it do hardware mpeg of AVI files?

Have you compare with Vitec DCM?

What software does it come with?

What is approximate cost?

Where can you order it?

Where can you see same samples.

Thanks,

Leon

Yes, it does trancoding of AVI to mpeg using hardware. The plus versions of the Vidac VMagic cards also use the hardware in the editor.

No, I haven't compaired it with the Vitec DCM. I did have a Hauppage PVR 250 for a couple of days wich I took back to the shop. The Vidac TV+ is much better.

It comes with a transcoder and video editor. It will even transcode vob files. Simply rip a dvd to one vob and then transcode it to whatever bitrate you need. I managed to backup a 3 1/2 DVD movie onto 1 DVD+R disk, the quality is really good.

They are not cheap. Prices can be found here:
http://www.vidac.de/deutsch/bestell.htm

I have the TV+ card which cost about 400 euro's including packaging etc
You can order it directly from Vidac. Just send them an e-mail and they will send instructions on how to order. Basically you must transfer money to there bank and then they ship the product.

Be aware, there is as yet no English documentation, only German. I do not speak any German myself and am using http://babel.altavista.com to translate bits of the PDF file from the installation CD. When its done I will put the info online. This will take some time though. The Vidac helpdesk are very good though, they even take the trouble to explain all the verious settings etc.

The program that comes with the card are by no means full blown editors. I edit my DV stuff with pinacle and use the Vidac to transcode the finished files to DVD MPEG's. Works great. The TV captures are also really good.
There are no samples I know of, I might put some online eventually though.

If you check the Capture Card section on this site you will find that there are no negative comments about Vidac cards.

Last but not least, the application that comes with the card is dual language. I.e. German or English.

[darkufo]

Hi I use the DV Storm 2 from Canopus and I've just put a mini review of it here :

http://www.vcdhelp.com/capturecards.php?CaptureCardRead=Canopus%20DV%20Storm%202&Search=Search

[wir98bjb]

The cheapest solution would indeed be to convert to NTFS and capture to AVI. You might want to download the lossless Huffyuv codec which will lightly compress your captures without loosing any quality.

I've downloaded that codec but had no good results. After a minute it had already dropped half the frames despite my P4 2,4GHz.
I think I'll try 10000Kbps compressed DivX, which looked okay in my tests.

rgds

Steffen

[ItsMe]

I am interested in the Vidac capture card. Could you give us a little more detail, since the site is in German I believe. http://www.vidac.de

Does it do hardware mpeg of AVI files?

Have you compare with Vitec DCM?

What software does it come with?

What is approximate cost?

Where can you order it?

Where can you see same samples.

Thanks,

Leon

Leon, I have found a VCD demo:

http://www.ntv-film.de/DemoVCD.mpg

[sterno]

I've downloaded that codec but had no good results. After a minute it had already dropped half the frames despite my P4 2,4GHz.
I think I'll try 10000Kbps compressed DivX, which looked okay in my tests.

If you're dropping lots of frames with HuffyUV but not DivX the problem may be your disk I/O. HuffyUV takes very little CPU power but it creates pretty big files (I've found it's often around half the size of uncompressed AVI) which means your capture drive has to be faster to keep up than with something like DivX that compresses a lot more.

[Leon8]

Thanks for such a detail reply. And I did get the link to the sample.

Have you compare the mpeg2 quality to any of the Software encoder
out there, such as Tmpgenc, MC, and ligos?



Thanks again,

Leon8

I am interested in the Vidac capture card. Could you give us a little more detail, since the site is in German I believe. http://www.vidac.de

Does it do hardware mpeg of AVI files?

Have you compare with Vitec DCM?

What software does it come with?

What is approximate cost?

Where can you order it?

Where can you see same samples.

Thanks,

Leon

Leon, I have found a VCD demo:

http://www.ntv-film.de/DemoVCD.mpg