new user looking for advice
 

i haven't been here long at all, just today in fact :) but the forum seems really nice from the posts i've read.

what i'm looking to do is convert vhs movies/tv show captures to kdvd...

i have both a wintv-go capture card, and an all-in-wonder 9700 pro that i can use for capturing along with a btc 1008 dvd burner. basically i'm looking for advice to capture the vhs tapes and then record them into kdvd or even something else if you guys think it's best. i don't even mind fitting 1 vhs capture per dvd if it means i have no loss on the picture quality over the original vhs tapes. i know that capturing requires alot from the vcr playing the tape (for quality, noise, etc) but i was curious as to what you guys think is the best procedure. the vcr i'm currently using is a panasonic pv8450 (not that great of a vcr) but i'm hoping to get decent quality. anyways, if you need anymore information please let me know.

Hi auxiliary,

I suggest you get a WinTV PVR-250 or 350, because that will allow you to capture 720x480 @12Mbps, without any dropped frames.
Then, you can re-encode with KDVD parameters with TMPEG or any other encoder.

If you want to capture with your current cards, you'll need a lot of disk space, and capture with either HuffYUV Codec or with Alparysoft Lossless Video Codec http://www.alparysoft.com/prod/compression/index.php

But the results will never be the same as with a hardware encoder, such as the WinTV PVRs.

-kwag

ahh, that sounds very reasonable. i can currently already capture 720x480 with my wintv-go with no dropped frames. but you're saying the quality would still be better with the pvr card? btw, i have plenty of hd space. 2 160 gig drives.

Are you sure of that :?:
Because at 720x480, even with the fastest SCSI drives, you will have dropped frames with BT8x8 based cards :!:
Capturing at 352x480, and with a fast processor, you might get away with a couple of dropped frames per 2 hour session.The MPEG-2 encoder chip in the PVR is really superb, and the quality is better than any BT-8x8 chipset.

-kwag

hrmm, yea i do capture at 720x480 with no dropped frames, just did it in both vdub and pvcr2. is that strange? i've always done that on this card.

i can post an mpg file that pvcr2 just captured if you want? maybe i think it's 720x480 but isn't or something. i'm just starting to learn this stuff

A straight, uninterrupted 2 hour capture :?:
What kind of hardware do you have :?:

p4 3.2ghz
asus p4c800-e deluxe
1024megs ddr400
wd 36gig raptor sata
2 x 160gig maxtor 7200rpm drives
ati radeon 9800 pro

this system has the bt8x8 capture card in it and i'm using powervcr II with some settings i found in a guide from vcdhelp.com. it says the video resolution is 720x480

Ok, I haven't tried a capture using a SATA drive.
So I guess you have the muscle to do it :arrow: (P4 @3.2Ghz + SATA) :lol:
However, the Connexant chipset on the PVRs is still better than the 8x8 chiset.
And capturing at 720x480 @12Mbps will give you a blockless MPEG-2 file, even on the fastest scenes.
One thing I can say, is that you will NOT be able to capture without loosing frames, if you use your PC for something else while capturing :!:
That's a fact. If you start browsing and opening file manager windows, you will loose frames.
This is something I can do with the WinTV PVR, because the capture is being done by hardware, and it uses almost no resources from the CPU.
I even tried a capture on an old PII @450Mhz, and I captured a TV episode without loosing frames, while browsing and doing other tasks. That's an impossible task with any BT-8x8 card, with such low CPU resources.
I'm now using my WinTV PVR with KnopMyth ( http://www.mysettopbox.tv/knoppmyth.html ) on a 1.3Ghz Celeron CPU, and it's just awesome :)

-kwag

yea, i totally agree about the card, i think it was just more cost that was throwing me off, but i have a gf3 i can put in instead of the 9700 pro in my 2nd pc and sell it off to pay for the pvr250. or should i get a 350? what's the difference between the two?

The 350 has S-Video TV out, and (I believe) MPEG-2 decoder on-board.
So it's a better deal ;)

-kwag

thanks for all the info, i'm going to look into the pvr

If you use the card only for capturing, choose PVR-250, not 350.

I recommend WinTVCap + WinTVCap Start as the capture program if you don't need all the fancy stuff and just want to capture :lol:

Related to non-dropping capturing while you can use your machine for other stuff I totally agree, that a hardware mpeg2 encoder chip is the first choice like a PVR 250.

But theres no problem doing capturing using todays used HDs and their bandwiths. I got a 7200rpm 2MB cache ATA 100 HD of 80GB for capturing and I dont have any dropped frames, even if I would use the power consumpting XVID codec at 768x576 and good quality settings.
With HuffYUV or PicVideo I only got 30% CPU usage, XVID would take about 80% but I dont use it as its not recomennded.

You already got a very high performing CPU, so you can get very good results with your hardware like you got now, but as said a PVR 250 is more confortable as it doesn't use the PCs CPU for encoding.

ahh, but if i wasnt planning on using the pc while it encoded i could use the existing card(s) i have to capture GOOD quality vhs encodes? thats basically all i want to do, i just want to convert my 30 vhs tapes to dvd's then i'll be done with capturing. if i need to buy the pvr250 for good quality results i will, but i'd like to save the money if it can be done with this wintv-go or my 9700aiw.

So your points are clear....

Do use HuffYUV (or PicvideoMJPEG at Quality 19) codecs and a resolution of 352x576(480) (in my experiences its enough for VHS sources and its btw. also DVD compatible). Do your audio capture directly at 48khz! so u dont have to convert it afterwards. And also do have a look in the avisynth section to enhance a bit your VHS sourcequality when doing the reencode. Be also shure your VHS heads are absolutley clean, as I have seen peoples using dirty VHS playback machines to convert VHS tapes to DVD and needing therefore an even higher avisynth filtering for reencoding ;-)

Nice product comparison between WinTV PVM models:
http://www.shspvr.com/reviews/comparison/comparison.htm

-kwag

that helps alot incredible, even using a full dvd for 1 vhs tape is pointless since vhs resolution is 352x480 (interlaced) right? so i should be able to fit more then 1 tape on a dvd without losing quality. i'll just need to make sure to use a NICE vhs player to make sure i don't lose alot of quality. like maybe borrow my friends svhs player.

that comparison is helpful too kwag, i'm going to try to use my current capture card first and see if the quality is up to my standards then if i have any trouble i'll purchase the pvr-350 for nice svideo support.

thanks again guys.

edit: should i try to capture larger resolution then resize it to make it look clearer? does that work well?

testing a capture at those res settings and stuff... using huffyuv the 5 minute capture i made was 1.25gigs?!? so a full movie would be like 30gigs?

Try the Alparysoft Lossless Video Codec. You'll get much more compression, and the Codec is lossless. :)

-kwag

Two more points the PVR-250 has in its favor. One is that the audio is hard locked to the video so you don't end up with sync problems. The second is that the card uses a really nice temporal filter (the spatial filter is not so good and is disabled by default) so the resulting mpeg requires very little filtering when reencoding. Actually if you are shooting for DVD you may find that no reencoding is even necessary. I capture TV episodes using the "MPEG2 12.0MBit/sec (CBR)" profile and feed that into TMPEGEnc via DVD2AVI and AVISynth and end up with a superb 704 x 480 KVCD per CD-R. The result is as about as close to DVD quality from an anolog source that you can get. Oh yeah, I think that going from mpeg to mpeg is a big plus too since it is similar to what you would do for a DVD backup so all the tips you get at KVCD.org are really helpful for capturing too.