newbie

[trancer]

hi all,got meself a pinnacle rave pctv card,i want to capture tv and video,i have read the forum and was wondering if there was anything simple for someone like me to just capture and record straight to mpg and burn to vcd simply.or even use as a video recorder?thx for any help

[theDruid]

trancer,

I'm not the world's greatest expert on this, but as far as I know there aren't many 'all-in-one' apps that capture from your card and output a nice tidy MPEG1 vcd-compliant file for you to burn.

One of the main problems is how quick the encoding has to be done. If you think that a good quality MPG1/VCD of a movie on a fast(ish) PC can take 8hrs+ to encode (so running at roughly 1/4 speed or less - you could say), you can see that capturing in realtime from a card to MPG1/VCD is not going to give you very good results.

The best way I know of doing it is to use Virtual Dub and the HuffyUv codec to capture from your card to an AVI file (this will be big, but not as big as if you didn't use HuffyUv! - you may need a big NTFS disk to capture to if you want to do whole movies all at once etc.. hint - don't set VirtualDub up to capture in a far bigger resolution than you're going to end up with on your VCD - this is another way to make the avi file smaller)

Then you can frameserve this avi later into TMPGEnc and encode it as a VCD-compliant MPG1, which will be ready to be burnt onto a CD-R with something like Nero.

There are loads of other ways of doing this - but with this method I've had pretty good results backing up old VHS tapes to VCD etc..

And no, it doesn't sound that straightforward, but there are quides on this site for the steps involved. Once you've got the hang of VirtualDub and TMPGEnc etc.. it's really not that hard.

I aim to do a 'step-by-step' guide soon of this method - and as soon as I do, I'll post it up here.

'hope this helps,

mcdruid.

[trancer]

i see what u mean, many thx for the reply most usefull