best capture method w/ Happague WinTV card?

[bjy999]

I was wondering what the best capture method to use is with
a Happague WinTV card?
I was using PowerVCRII 3.0 to capture into 6000kbps MPG2
then CCE to convert to around 2400 MVB MPG2 like 6 or 7 passes
but the video looked fuzzy and I had some lines in it.
I used the temporal smoother with my avisynth script but
it was still fuzzy.
I was using my directTV box to capture from with a S-video
cable.
I dont know much about avisynth
In powervcr would it be better to capture at 720x480 or
640x480 or 480x480 because im gonna resize it to 480x480
anyways.
(athalon 2000+ , 512 ram , 60gig maxtor 133 HD and WinXP Pro)
Thanks

[dar1us]

Try iuVCR from iuLABs

Get it here: http://www.iulabs.com/download/iuvcr_setup.exe]

It is quite a powerful little tool that works well, it keeps audio in sync, is fiddleable and is easy to use and get the hang of. My only quibble is the GUI seems a little out dated. Not that it isn't easy to look at, but a bit static, boring.

You can also try VirtualDub_sync which is a VirtualDub mod that dynamically synchronises the audio with the video (protecting youself against de-synchronisation).
http://www-user.rhrk.uni-kl.de/~dittrich/sync/VirtualDub-1_4_13__sync1_03/VirtualDub-1_4_13__sync1_03.zip

Both are good and allow more post-processing, capture the image much more raw. You can fiddle with things your own way instead of it doing everything you want.

I hope after all of that, the WinTV has WDM drivers:D

[theReal]

If you have enough HD-space, capture to full resolution HuffYUV with VDub sync. For resizing I'd use one of the avisynth filters, then you can choose between the different alorithms (lanczos=very sharp, bicubic=sharp, bilinear=soft). The realtime resizing used by PowerVCR is probably worse than any of the avisynth resizing filters and in addition to that you probably need to deinterlace, which is only possible with a full resolution source video.

but the video looked fuzzy and I had some lines in it. I'm not sure what you mean with "fuzzy", but I guess you're talking about interlace artefacts when you say there are lines - use decomb to deinterlace your video in avisynth.
Temporalsmoother is ok for making the video more compressible, but also try convolution3d and temporalsoften (each on its own or in combination, you have to try what looks best)