Recommended Filters for Digital Satellite Caps?

[oook]

Hi,

I think this question is more relevant here than on the DVB forum since it involves analog capturing...

My setup is a digital satellite receiver with composite video out into a Pinnacle PCTV card. Usually I capture at 768x576 using VirtualVCR and MJPEG or Huffyuv and then use DVX to cut, crop, telecide, resize and encode to divx (no filtering).

This gives relatively satisfactory results, but I know it can be better. There is obviously no or very little noise from the broadcast signal, but I think the equipment and cables are generating some noise which is evident in large areas of uniform colour, faces, cars, etc... The original capture also seems slightly blurred.

(If anyone can recommend a good free host where I can upload and link to a couple of megs of bmp's and a short capture I'll gladly upload examples...)

I have tried a variety of filters, but they seem to be geared towards a different type of noise than what I'm experiencing, since the end result always looks worse than the original even at low thresholds.

Any suggestions?

Thanks...

PS: I think the capture guide should make at least a passing reference to DVX, its really by far the simplest and most powerful tool to use for analog captures in my experience.. (http://www.planetdvb.net/dvx )

[wotef]

same as always - you have to try some filters out and make your best judgement

if you like dvx so much, why don't you use its filter support to make some quick and easy tests?

e.g. compare c3d, deen, peachsmoother, etc...

[Herske]

Well, I have the same setup: digital sat receiver + pinnacle pctv board (bt878 based).

I doing huffy compressed caps, with a short (~30 cm) svideo cable (avoiding bt878 subpar color separation filters); the noise present is due to the capture card.

At the moment I'm staying with DUST (avisynth filter written by steady) for filtering, I find it the best compromise between quality and speed, although I had decent results with convolution3d.

[High Speed Dubb]

...I think the equipment and cables are generating some noise which is evident in large areas of uniform colour, faces, cars, etc... The original capture also seems slightly blurred...

It sounds like this could be a compression artifact rather than noise. That sort of thing can be helped by adding noise — You might want to give the BlockBuster filter a try.

[^^-+I4004+-^^]

>There is obviously no or very little noise from the broadcast signal, but I think the equipment and cables are generating some noise which is evident in large areas of uniform colour, faces, cars, etc... The original capture also seems slightly blurred.

DVB has the advantage of being "noiseless"(at least there's no noise in analog sense),but other disadvantages are rarely spoken of............
all stuff you said i would say too for DVB after looking some samples (as i don't own it myself).......
it looks too smoothed(blurred) and you'll notice it even more on monitor as ti has better sharpness than tv-set.....at least,that's my impression...

if possible,send few jpeg's (made from raw video ie. screenshots from VDub or such) to
kosta_@net.hr
,and i'll probably put that to my web space (no bmp's or other file types as free providers usually don't provide that option...)

/ivo

[bofw3]

Originally posted by oook
My setup is a digital satellite receiver with composite video out into a Pinnacle PCTV card. Usually I capture at 768x576 using VirtualVCR and MJPEG or Huffyuv and then use DVX to cut, crop, telecide, resize and encode to divx (no filtering).


I know that this was not what you asked, but you'll probably be better served by a DVB card on the PC, this way you'll get the full quality of the broadcast and no added noise. Also remeber that most DVB transmitions are not near 768x576, the top is 720x576 but most use 480x576... that's way they are blury, because they have to be expanded...