I would like to start capturing TV show episodes. HELP!

[GMBGarou]

I would like to start capturing TV show episodes so that I can distribute them to my friends who are not able to watch them on TV. My friends all said that the higher the quality, the better. So I aim to capture this video at 640 X 480. At 30 Frames per second. I need to know how to do this with my current system setup.

CPU: 800 MHZ AMD Athlon Thunderbird (Socket 7)
MOTHERBOARD: ABIT KT7A v1.3
VIDEO CARD: 32 MB Creative Annihlator 2 (GeForce 2 GTS) (AGP)
CAPTURE CARD: ATI TV-Wonder (PCI)
SOUND CARD: Sound Blaster Live! X-Gamer
HARD DRIVE: 20 GB Western Digital (WD200) (7200 RPM)
CD-ROM: 50X ASUS (S500)
CD-RW: 16X10X40 LG (GCE-8160B)
NETWORK CARD: SMC EZ Card 10/100 PCI (SMC1211 Series)
MOUSE: Microsoft USB IntelliMOuse Optical
KEYBOARD: Logitech Internet Navigator Keyboard USB
WEBCAM: Logitech QuickCam Express USB

Please tell me exactly what I must do in order to capture these episodes.

[kustomkla80]

Sorry to say, but I think 640x480 would be out of the question. I have a 900mhz duron, tv wonder ve, and 256mb ram. Now because I have the tv wonder ve, I can't capture anything higher than x240, so 480 is out of the question. Now maybe with your not ve card you can, but I don't think you'll get a good result. I've been pretty happy with my results capturing with virtualdub, to an avi compressed with the Huffyuv v2.1.1 patch v0.2.2 at 352x240. The I convert it to a vcd standard or xvcd mpeg, and watch it on my tv. (For xvcd, I just use an svcd variable bitrate to make high motion scenes look better). Maybe the non ve version of the tv wonder is that much better that you can capture at a resolution as high as 640x480, but I have my doubts.

[macleod]

when you say "exactly", was there something in one of the many guides available at this site that gave you a question scenario that you could not answer and you are asking for more help?

There are still more questions that need to be answered. Your friends watching them, for instance, where are they going to view your caps, on the standalone DVD player or on their pc. If it is a standalone dvd player, what formats are most compatible with what they have?

Based on the information for "higher the better", cap in vdub uncompressed and then re-encode the avi to whatever format (vcd,xvcd,svcd,cvd,dvd) that all of your friends dvd players can play with tmpgenc or cce or one of the other commercial encoders with the applicable standards for each format, and then burn with nero or maxrecord or other available burning software.

based on your hard drive size and assumed available space on that drive, uncompressed avi should yield you about 5-15 minutes of data. With that size hard drive I would recommend you go with one of the many codecs available to compress the picture (I personally use pegasys's product) set to 18.