AIW captured video has bar at bottom of playback

[cosmo1]

I'm having a problem with my AIW radeon. And as you may know getting help from ATI is an all day job. Hope you may have seen this and have an answer. Here's the issue. When I capture in VCD format in the MMC7.1 (I think thats the version) from the TV tuner or from a live video camera, play back of the video is fine and if I use Nero to burn a VCD that comes out fine also. However if I try to capture from a tape from a camcorder (composite or S-video) or from a VCR when I playback the captured file I get a small bar of distorted video at the bottom of the screen. If you were viewing full screen it would be the size of the windows task bar. Why would this show up only from a tape source? At first I thought maybe something was up with the external video jack or cable but the live video from camera proves that wrong? Any help you could give would be appriciated.

[ronnylov]

This is completely normal when playing a VCR tape. But you won't see it on the TV because it is hidden below the visible picture area. I don't think you can see it if you play the VCD on a standalone player hooked up to a TV but you will see it when watching the VCD on a PC monitor.

What I do is to capture with a lossless codec like huffyuv and then with avisynth or virtualdub crop the distorded areas of the picture, and then add black borders to save some bitrate. Then I encode it with TMPGEnc. But with ATI MMC you capture in real time so then there is nothing to do about it.

[MOVIEGEEK]

I recommend using MMC 7.6 or 7.7 that way you can crop captured video
or use TMPGEnc using Full Screen setting.

[cosmo1]

Thanks for the replys. I want to make sure this is normal... One last detail. When I input the video from VCR or camcorder it looks normal in the MMC window (no video bar at the bottom). Only on playback of the file is the bar I'm talking about visible. I don't have an evternal DVD player yet to try my VCD on but I was hoping that maybe the bar would no show. Thanks for your help.

[ronnylov]

MPEG video encoding is separated into blocks of the picture. The VCR picture is normally distorted in the bottom 3-4 lines or so. But this noise is hard to encode for the encoder and at low bitrates like VCD it may produce block noise. And if the blocks are in a row at the bottom you will have a bar of noise.

I use MMC 7.7 but I have not seen the option to manually crop the picture but there is a "record cropped video" or something similar but I have not tested it myself. How does it work?

[Nelson37]

The "Record Cropped Video" will give you 672x448 or 448x448 video size, I resize to 336x448 and add borders to 352x480, the borders are invisible on the TV. Capturing smaller video can give improvements in quality and frame drops.

You can achieve this with finer control with Stinky's Reg Tool, as I recall the crop Percentages round to values of 16.

[ronnylov]

This is interesting. I have always done this manually when I capture with AVI_IO and encode with TMPGEnc. But 448x448 is not standard SVCD size. Wouldn't it be better if it cropped to 448x448 and added borders to 480x480? Or perhaps this is exactly what it does? I have to test it!

[Nelson37]

MMC does not add the borders, you can do this in AviSynth or Vdub, or I think with one of the settings in TMPGenc.