Specific Capture Card

[2ZOD.COM]

I'm looking for a specific capture card with RCA jack inputs and that can encode MPEG-2 in real-time. It also needs to be real good quality.

I'm looking to convert about 70 VHS tapes to DVD, and I need a good capture card.

Does anyone know of any good capture cards that can accomplish this? Or, hell, does it even exist?

Thanks

[jggimi]

It depends what you mean by "real time." Do you mean Hardware encoding on the card, or do you mean software that encode in MPEG-2? If the latter, I have an AverTV PCI card (BT878) that came with capture software that encodes MPEG-2 at bitrates up to 20000 kbps.

After many configuration changes I managed to get the Aver software to capture MPEG-2 at high resolution and high bitrates (above 10K kbps) with an acceptably few frame drops. To do this on my Athlon 950Mhz, I had to set the MPEG-2 GOP to 100% I-frames. P/B frames consumed too much CPU.

After many tests and comparisons of captures, I switched from MPEG-2 to MJPEG capture with Vdub/AVI_IO/BTWinCap, even for eventual MPEG-2 encoding. For me, this gave me a better looking MPEG-2 video stream than Aver's capture tools.

[Boulder]

I wouldn't use real-time encoded MPEG files to create DVDs. Like jggimi said, quality is better when you capture to MJPEG and then use another program (like TMPGEnc) to create the MPEG-2 file.

[dilly]

I find the hardware encodes on all the cards I've used are really only good for setting up a timer, recording, watching, deleting. The quality (and not to mention compatibilaty) is not good enough to archive, for archiving its best to capture an AVI (in a compressed format of some kind maybe, HuffyUV or otherwise) and then encode to DVD compliant MPEG-2.

Plus, the nature of capturing VHS: you're probably going to want to apply some filters, etc. which would not be possible in-realtime MPEG-2 capture without massive framedrops.

But, if you just want a simple backup and quality isn't a concern, Leadtek Winfast 2000XP has MPEG-2 hardware encode, and it has composite inputs. The box even claims it has MPEG-4 onboard, but I have not looked into this at all since I don't use the software with it anymore. When I did try the shipped software for capturing TV I got acceptable DVD compliant captures with minimal frame drops but I was disappointed when I couldn't do much with the resulting MPG file(editing, filtering, etc). I have not tried this with VHS however.

[2ZOD.COM]

Awesome, I didn't know all that stuff. Well, screw real-time capture.

I meant mpeg-2 hardware encoding on the card, but I guess I won't be using that if the qualities not that great.

I was looking at that AverDVD card, and since you say I should be able to do it with that I'll probably end up getting it. So then, I shouldn't be losing any quality (because of the vhs source it's already not that great) if I want to burn them to DVD's later?

Yeah, I was looking to use some filters to maybe improve the quality, but I don't really know how to use them or anything. They can be very beneficial with my kind of 'project', correct?

Thanks a lot for the insight here. I'm still a total newb.

[Boulder]

If you really want to start working with filters, Avisynth is the way to go. The scripts may seem complex at first but soon you'll get the hang of it. The forums here are also a huge Avisynth knowledge database so you'll probably get all the "newbie" answers you need just by using the search or by checking www.avisynth.org out.

[2ZOD.COM]

Awesome. I'll really get into that stuff.

I'm reading up on it now. Thanks so much for the info.