Specific Capture Card

[2ZOD.COM]

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[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]

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[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]

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