Which codec is best?

[japniz]

Hi,

Can anyone help? I have a Pinnacle DC10+ capture card which uses the default capture of MJPEG, although it has quite a selection of other codecs. I'm interested in quality rather than compression and wondered if I could be using a better codec. A post on the useful Pinnacle forum webboards suggests HUFFYUV. Would anyone go along with this, or have any other ideas?

I've read a lot about DIV X, both on VCDhelp.com and on other sites. Is it worth considering as the comments on quality seem to vary widely, as well as it's 'playbackability'?

A third question, other posts I've read on other sites over the past few weeks say PC screen viewing has nothing on VHS TV screen quality. This was a bit of a surprise and I wonder if is true? I had only planned to playback on my pc until I could afford a DVD player. From this comment, it seems like I would be better outputting to tape.

Any opinions on these three points would be very welcome. Thanks.

[japniz]

This site is the online bible for video editing - surely, someone must have an opinion.

[rhuala2]

Opinions... ok

1. The reason u may not have got many responses is because ur thread title has been discussed about 8.7 billion times, but u are new so I'll give ur questions a shot.

2. Codec is all about quality vs. compression if u want the absolute best quality and have a huge hd, then use no compression (raw .avi) this will give u best PQ. Huffyuv is probably the next best step to good PQ will little compression. Personally I use Morgan Codec, which compresses even more but I find is a good balance of compression vs. PQ. If you have the HD space I would recommend capturing to large file with little compression then encoding with TMPGEnc (which can also be used for editing and cropping) at whatever bitrate optimizes your final medium

3. As for DivX it is the most popular compression for swapping movie files over the internet but if you ever want to play your stuff in a stand alone player you will need to create either a CD based on VCD or SVCD or a DVD which all require MPEG1/2 format. No stand alone players support DivX yet, but there are a few high priced ones coming down the pipeline.

4. If you want to see the difference between PC vs TV viewing. Capture a file in SVCD format and play back on TV. On the computer it will look very stretched yet on the TV it will look fine. Your stand alone player will detect that it is a SVCD and compress it in the vertical direction thus increasing the quality over a VCD.

When you say u only plan to playback on your PC I find that hard to imagine since as you rip/capture more and more your hd will get gobbled up fast. Eventually you will want to store your stuff on CD or DVD. Anything I know I will only run on my PC (short little joke clips ...etc) I capture at 352x240 using bitrate around 2000 - 3000. Anything I plan to store on CD /DVD I capture or re-encode to CVD (352x480) at bitrate 2500 to 3500 depending on my mediums size. CVD Template can be found in tools section. Remember bitrate is everything, bitrate = quality = size.

Hope this helps, good luck...

rhuala

[Fozzee]

There is a standalone player out there that supports DivX .

KiSS DVD Player DP-450


Fozzee

[japniz]

What can I say, rhuala2? Thanks for humouring my newbie question. I had thought it quite specific, but clearly not.

Thanks for confirming Huffy as the best choice for quality. Yes, I was aware of the size issue, but prefer to shell out for HD space than lose even a pixel of the precious home vid footage.

Thanks for your thoughts on DivX. I have done a trial but the quality wasn't very inspiring, though the file was small.

The difference between TV and PC was very interesting. Again, glad to hear you confirm what I'd read elsewhere. Unfortunately, my s.alone DVD player doesn't support either VCD or SVCD! So I can't try out your test suggestion. I think I may be outputting to tape to see how that goes.

Yes, I only really planned to playback on a pc as an MPEG 1 or 2, archiving on the regular CDR or CDRW. AGain, I don't have a DVD player in my system (sorry, couldn't include my system details as the Profile page wouldn't let me update).

Your capture info was also very useful though your screen resolution seems very small. I understood that the larger res, the better - my setting is 768 x 576 - I'm on PAL - and at 3600 bit rate. (If I bump the rate up any higher, I drop too many frames.)

Again, thanks for your help.