Quantcast Recording Video: Digital Quality from Analog Source - digitalFAQ.com Forums [Archives]
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07-30-2003, 05:38 PM
Dano Dano is offline
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I would like to start out with a big thanks to Kwag and all the others on this board who helped me to achieve what I thought was impossible. I got into the video scene less than two years ago and have been hooked ever since. I started out with an AverTV Stereo card and upgraded(?) to an ATI TV Wonder VE and eventually an AIW 8500DV. I have done literally hundreds of captures some in real time and others which I have reencoded. The experts will say that capturing to huffyuv and reencoding will yield the best results. This may be true for DVD bitrates but I cannot say since I do not own a DVD burner, but it most definitley is not true for lower bitrates like VCD and SVCD. I picked up a Hauppage WinTV PVR-250 about a month ago (Iknow Kwag has one but has been too busy to play with it) and was so impressed by its realtime capturing that I only did some minor testing with reencoding and concluded that the quality difference was not enough to bother with. I was dead wrong. I have reencoded a few TV episodes to KVCD at 704 x 480 using the lates MA script and the results are DVD quality, I was absolutely blown away. Last night I encoded the movie Menno's Mind from the SciFi channel which is 86 minutes long to a one CD KVCD 544 x 480 and the result was stunning. I can say that it would be indistinguishable from a DVD backup using the same parameters. I know some of you might think that this is not possible but I have a feeling that once Kwag gets a chance he will confirm what I am saying. In the interest of keeping this post from being lengthy I will end this post here and would be more than happy to write a thorough guide explaining what I did and maybe Kwag could let me up a sample or two.
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-Dano
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  #2  
07-31-2003, 11:01 AM
el_mero_zooter el_mero_zooter is offline
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Dano,
Glad to hear everything is well now.
This is what it's all about...finding that sweet-spot, for your digital video needs. Would love to see a guide on your process. Im sure it'd help out others too.
How was your AverTV card. I picked up one of these, {on clearance}, to try out. It was one with the fm tuner.
Im mostly an ATI loyalist, but for my next pc, i may go the Hauppage WinTV card. Funny, I almost bought one two years ago cuz it had a remote, before I settled , or was subliminally, talked into the ATI Radeon series....


ZtR
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07-31-2003, 11:36 AM
Dano Dano is offline
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Actually the AverTV card was pretty decent for the money and they are pretty good about driver updates. I think that most BTx tv cards are pretty much the same but I hear the newer 10bit Conexant chips are a bit better. The software that you use to capture is really the most important component, and I found that WinDVR and ATI MMC were the best for real time capture and VirtualVCR was excellent at .avi capturing. The Aver card ran much better on WinDVR than my AIW but if you have the patience you can actually get the Aver card to run under MMC. If you are looking at the WinTV cards I would spend the extra cash on the PVR ones since they are hardware encoders and the really cool thing is you can encode in TMPGenc while the card is recording. After disabling the preview my PVR-250 uses between 1-5% cpu and that is doing 720 x 480 at CBR of 12Mbps. I will work on the guide first chance I get. I am going to do a test and cap Alien from SciFi and do a dvd backup of the same and encode them both the same way to show what I am talking about.
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09-29-2003, 05:27 PM
FinalAeon FinalAeon is offline
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Hey, I really want to be able to capture high quality capures and have tried screwing around with it but havent had much luck. My first TV card purchase was a Happauge Win-TV PVR 250, and as stubborn as I was i didn't see the quality in it and decided that it was the card. So I found a sale on a new graphics card (Originally $300 but it was $150) and it was an ATI Radeon All-In-Wonder 8500 128MB. This had a built in analog to capture video with.

With his new card I saw slight improvement. But then I started wondering, "Well since I have regular cable, maybe that's the quality problem..." If some one could answer me this question telling me whether or not the cable type is what the quality is based on. Like if I were to get Digital Cable would the quality be any better?

Also I would like to know what programs you use. (Since I hear the ATI software sucks, and that I should use VirtualDubMod) I also need to know what settings to make the BEST possible quality with the least mmount of space. I am an encoder and have done many encodes that are 640x480, super high quality (i can swear their better than dvd [with the smooth filter of course]), and a 24 minutes file is only about 190MB. If there is some way to capture anything near this please tell me. Actually the big issue is capture "quality" no matter how big it is because I can just re-encode it the way i like it.

So the big question is:
Is Digital Cable going to capture better quality than regular cable? Or is it the type of card I use that makes the quality difference? (If this is the problem please tell me the best card to use that's on the market)

And another thing. Both of my cards say they can take up to 125 channels, but if I get Digital cable with say 300 channels and hook the analog source to the digital cable box, and then from the digital cable box to my computer, will that give me all the channels? And can I even do this? (Hooking the cable box to it)
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