Best capturing for large 82-100" HDTV playback?
 

Hi LordSmurf,

First, I want to take a moment to thank you for creating DigitalFAQ. I especially enjoyed your very helpful and easy to digest guides on ATI All-in-Wonder capture cards. When I got started with video capturing in 2004, I worked off your guides exclusively and was extremely satisfied with the results. In fact, when my system died due to a power surge in 2008, I tried a few alternatives before I eventually relented and purchased a new custom built computer that had AGP so I could continue using the ATI card.

In any event, I'm trying to determine where to go next. I have an 82" television and a hi-def projector capable of projecting images at about 100". I still have a few hundred VHS tapes that I would like to convert to some digital medium. I am thinking of simply capturing the tapes to MPEG using the ATI card and storing the raw MPEGs on a 3TB hard drive which I can access and stream to my TV or projector via a server (For what it's worth, I plan on utilizing two 3 TB drives and keeping one for backup purposes only).

I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on the viability of this. Is MPEG still a good format for capture and playback in this manner? In addition, I may need to occasionally burn DVDRs from these files, so a format that could be easily converted would be desirable. Should I consider AVI and possibly Huffy? I also imagine anything I capture will have to be done with DVD specs in mind.

Thanks in advance,
Justin
--justin81

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Hello, and thanks for your kind words. And most humbled that you had used my methods. :)

The larger the viewing device, the more obvious errors and noise are. And the more compressed a format is, the more likely it will have noise and errors. VHS was a noisy consumer analog tape format, for example. And then MPEG-2 can be a very lossy format, depending on quite a few variables, including source and encoding method. While VHS captured directly to MPEG-2 (on the ATI AIW cards) looked fine on SDTVs of the era, and even HDTVs up to 60" (with playback filters), I'd be lying if I said the picture would be excellent at 80-100". I'd honestly have this workflow, for that source:

1. Capture to lossless Huffyuv AVI.
2. Carefully filter the video with Avisynth and/or VirtualDub, to remove encoding-resistant noise and errors.
3. Encode to H.264 MPEG-4 with a very decent bitrate. Or high bitrate MPEG-2 (15-25Mbps).

That would yield an awesome image. :)

But that would also result in a Blu-ray or streamed-only version.
For a "DVD version", simply encode a normal bitrate MPEG-2 as an alternate Step 3. Do both -- one "the best", one for DVD-Video format.

If you have more questions, just ask. :)

__

Note: Sorry for the slow reply to this question -- tech questions asked through PMs and emails are answered much slow than posts.
Always ask here on this forum, in posts, for the quickest replies.