Thanks for your reply.
I had read about that legacy driver for Win7 and installed it immediately after connecting the new PCI card, which came by post earlier this morning.
I don't have TMPGEnc, and I'm reluctant to buy it just on the off-chance it could work.
However, I can report some success: Adobe Premiere reads the DV AVI file and outputs that as interlaced h.264 in mp4 container. Yes! :-)
Still up for suggestions to get this up and running with free and lean software - not necessarily a fan of heavy duty packages like Nero or Premiere. I may get a bit further by doing some more reading...
By the way, I tried the trick of passing the DV AVI through WinFF, hoping to create something that could be read by
Avidemux (as suggested in another thread). Didn't work for me, sadly.
-- merged --
Some further progress: WinDV now works! Not quite sure what happened there, might be a matter of the software taking its time to recognise the stream. More testing is needed to be sure about this, but might it be that WinDV doesn't easily detect DV streams that are connected when the computer is already up and running? Anyway, rather pleased with this. At least WinDV tells me how many frames have been dropped. Nero doesn't.
-- merged --
(I completely edited the following post about an hour after posting...)
I have now added the necessary codecs to
Virtualdub to output h.264 (x.264, actually...) in an AVI container. At first, I had simply installed the most recent x264vfw codec, but that appeared to have dropped some interlacing settings I could see on the following page:
I was looking at a guide how to install h.264 for
Virtualdub, here:
http://www.wcreplays.com/forums/show...-and-Lame-mp3=
Luckily, I persevered and managed (despite my limited computer skills...) to install an older version of this codec. Hey presto, settings present, including interlacing off/tff/bff. Guess what: this worked!! Most happy with that. Need to sort out some minor stuff (no audio on my test output file, wrong aspect ratio etc.) but I think I just may have conquered the biggest problem I was facing with this. Good!
For reference: current (2015) x264vfw codec installers do not give interlacing options in Virtualdub. I installed one that was released around the time the guide I linked to was written (2009). I got it from here:
http://www.videohelp.com/software/x264-VFW/old-versions
The one I picked was x264vfw.2019kMod.x86.exe.
-- merged --
Looks like x264vfw plugins released up to 2013 or so have the necessary interlacing settings available. I think I'm right in saying those are the plugins as tweaked by 'Komisar', as opposed to those by 'Masternobody'.
Things are looking good, although there's one niggle: reencoding to h.264 with Virtualdub using an earlier x264vfw plugin goes rather slow - on my computer somewhere between 20 - 25 fps (and it's clogging up a lot of CPU in the process). Later x264vfw plugins go a lot faster - more like 70 fps - but lack the desired interlaced setting.
Question: would it be possible to run a later x264vfw, setting interlacing options with the command line option?
Edited to add: going to try something myself later on anyway, copying some useful advice I found on the dedicated Handrabre forum, which enabled me to do interlaced DV AVI -> h.264 with Handbrake.
The following works, using Handbrake 0.9.8:
'Picture tab': set 'Anamorphic' to 'Strict' (if necessary).
'Advanced' tab: add in the box at the bottom ':bff=1' or ':tff=1' depending on whether your source has either bottom or top field first.
That's it.
(This may be old news for real pros, but I spent some time looking all this up, so perhaps this may save someone some time, some day...)
I know next to nothing about command lines so randomly typing stuff in the box would be madness. But if anyone has a suggestion, I'd be most grateful.
By the way, going to write something that may be useful to someone, one day. Cutting videos in Virtualdub appears to be rather cumbersome - looks like you can't simply chop out several small bits. Alternative:
Open Virtualdub output (h.264 in AVI container) in
Avidemux 2.6.
Save with video and audio both set to stream copy, inside mkv container.
Reopen that file in Avidemux. You can now edit the file.
(Avidemux 2.6 won't allow you to use the glider to go through the recording when you simply import the Virtualdub AVI file. Avidemux 2.4 will do that, but you lose audio after the first cut.)
-- merged --
(Thread is getting messy. This is becoming a log of my progress!)
Addition to the Handbrake story. Don't know where this came from, but all of a sudden HB was refusing to process files with added 'bff=1' argument. When I took a closer look at the other arguments, I saw 'weightp=1', and I remembered a Virtualdub warning that (when I googled it) apparently comes down to the fact you can't have both interlaced and weightp=1 at the same time (not that I know what weightp actually is). Anyway; I bravely deleted it, and then HB once more accepted my files, and at some speed - x264vfw old style with VD is about 20-25 fps, new x264vfw speeds up to about 70 fps, and HB almost doubles that yet again, churning out a file at around 135 fps. Does seem to take up almost all CPU power, but at something like half an hour to process the digital equivalent of a four hour VHS tape I can live with that.
-- merged --
Two further pointers.
-Handbrake should not do away with any side pixels (top, bottom, left, right) it deems unnecessary. Make sure to set all to zero.
-Having done a few encodes, I have noticed Handbrake occasionally/frequently creates files where the pictures breaks up at some point (losing something like a second or so of footage in the process). You don't want that because it may cause problems further down the line - some/many software packages refuse to render such a file beyond the stutter point, and players may stop at that point as well.
In a way, the fact other software doesn't like these files makes it easy to identify them. My solution: import the Handbrake output file into Avidemux. If the file gets accepted, it should be fine. If it doesn't, chances are there's a picture break-up at some point - so best to run the original DV AVI again through Handbrake.
Only started investigating this today, that's why I have not yet had the chance to redo a problematic file. Here's hoping the stutters are not caused by specific incidents that are part of the source DV AVI file, in which case rendering again obviously wouldn't help.
