Need help - vey specific capturing hardware needs.

[radorn]

Hello:

I'm looking for capture hardware.

Regional TV in my province is going to air some old series I want to capture and encode because they say it's the last time they're going to air them, and I really like the dub.

So I was looking for good capturing hardware, but I have not knowledge of how good the available hardware in the market is, and searching and comparing arround shops is pretty tedious and unproductive because of the lack of good descriptions for the stuff they shell. Also I doubt about the objectivity of sites like cnet, so prone to "help" those who pay for good reviews.

I was hopping people here could help me find a card or a good site/s to find detailed information.

I live in spain so I'm capturing PAL
also, I'm on a laptop (p4 3ghz, 512DDR, and more than enough disk available) so the "card" must be external, either usb or firewire (firewire400 I think). I have a desktop also, but the specs are poor, not suitable for capturing.

I want to make good captures, the more original format preserving the best. I'm going to capture anime among others, Dragon Ball and Evangelion (which I want because of the dub, that is in galician, you can't find anywhere else), and, as allways, they are converted to 50hz with the crappy telecine thing instead of the more propper 23.976 -> 25 throttling. Because of that I would like to (try to) ivtc them, so I would need a card that can capture in the original 720x576 (or whatever it is) interlaced mode.
I'm not sure if there's something like that.

Any kind of help is appreciated

Thank you in advance :)

edit: Internal card recommendations would also be interesting if limitations on external hardware would be too restrictive, like having no facilities to capture losslessly, ie, using RGB or YUV, to huffyuv, lossless snow, or whatever)

[Sergei_Esenin]

Since you need an external device it will have to be either an MPEG-2 or DV encoder. Look for European versions of the Canopus ADVC boxes or the Hauppage WinTV PVR-USB2 (not the old PVR-USB, the PVR-USB2). I've also heard some good things about the Plextor and Lifeview hardware MPEG-2/4 encoders, but also some problems.

[radorn]

I see. I would prefer to capture losslessly, so if that is not possible with an external device, I would like internal card recommendations as well.

I edited the thread to reflect that.

Thanks for your answer

[mustardman]

You would be very likely happy with the ADVC100 (or ADVC300). Both are external, and although they do compress to DV, the quality is superb.

If you want to capture old series from TV, the quality is probably not going to be brilliant anyway, and I seriously doubt if you would be able to spot any difference.

Even if you do capure losslessly, what are you going to do with the data? Create DV tapes -> go straight for DV capture. Create DVDs -> DV quality is considerably higher than MPEG2 in the first place.

If you get ghosts on your image or don't have a strong signal, then going lossless may have benifits for post-processing. But I use DV capturing and do one-step of post-processing before going to DV (tape)finals, and I can't fault the image, especially on older material that is questionable in quality to begin with.

Leading on to IVTC processes (and NTSC/PAL resizing), that is going to damage quality quite a bit. The damage done by DV compression will be significantly less.

I can understand your desire for maximum quality, but don't go overboard trying to acheive something you can't!

MM

[pelmen]

also your hard drive will effect capturing ability..the faster the RPM of the drive (and cache size) then better chance you have of minimising dropped frames. if you capture to a drive or partition that already has data on it then you increase the chance of dropped frames from defragmentation. the longer duration you capture the more chance of dropped frames occuring.

personally i capture at high bitrate divx avi and can do all my post processing in a single batch step in virtualdub to get the final avi. this suits my needs. smart smoothing on cartoon captures removes all traces of any compression artifacts (IF there are any), so trying to go for lossless capture is porbably overkill (also you're going to need terabytes of storage space if you are going to caputre a tv series in uncompressed format).

also consider that most broadcasts are MPEG2 these days (regardless of whether the broadcast is an analogue or digital signal the source at the tv station is most often played back off hard drive based systems that have the programs stored in mpeg2 format). this means not all compression artifacts you will get actually are a result of your setup, they could be what is being broadcast (i've seen block artifacts in both transmitted material and in commercial DVDs (most people forget that DVDs are a compressed format too :) ) I avoid MPEG2 capturing because MPEG tends to compound compression artifacts faster with each generation than DIVX AVIs do.


Perhaps in reality your best bet is make sure you have a good signal from your antenna to reduce ghosting/snow (if this is the source of the broadcast for you). And maybe look at getting a DVD Recorder VCR unit, I haven't used them myself but I've heard a lot of positive things about the recording quality on them and from there you can post process and remove ads etc at your leisure. Or use a DV camcorder to capture to DV then deal with it later on the computer.


If you are serious about the PC capture solution then about the only way to ensure absolute quality is to get a true video capture board (not these crappy things you would have looked at, the high end pro gear that has four figure and above price tags). These often require a dedicated hard drive (or several) for the card itself which is formatted in a custom format by the card to ensure broadcast quality record/playback. Extremely expensive but it'll do the job without all the hassles of lesser consumer level cards or crappy USB solutions.


Then there is the M$ factor of the OS deciding to blue screen during your capture ;)


The options are really up to you depending on your budget. If the series being broadcast is available on DVD somewhere that would certainly be the cheapest solution to just buy it that way. Also TV studios and film/video archive institutes either have the ability or can put you in contact with the appropriate people who have the ability to get you a copy of the broadcast title on pretty much any format you like, you just pay a copyright fee and processing fee but you'll get about as good a quality copy as you'll ever get. Often this isn't as expensive an option as you'd think, I've known people who have bought movies not available on DVD in DVD format from a film archive for about 30-40% more than a typical DVD retail price which is pretty good considering its a one off item.

good luck

[radorn]

Hello:

First, thanks for your responses.

I really feared that the thing I am looking for is too expensive, but had to ask.

Anyway.

I don't know where you live, I'm from Galicia, wich is a region in the norwest of Spain and if has it's own language. "Televisión de Galicia", wich is the regional TV channel here has happened to license dub to galician and broadcast them in the past. One of them is the Dragon Ball series, wich, yes, is available on DVD, VHS, and many other formats, but, so far, no one has released any edition with the galician dub. The interest is precisely that, because I think it is billiant, and extremely funny also. Now they are going to broadcast it again after quite many years, and they say it is the last time they are doing so.
The problem for capturing is that, as I am on PAL region, we have a re-licensed version of the series (and this is the same for Dragon Ball and all the rest), wich in Europe uses to be a GermanyORFrance->Spain then any local TV (we in spain have 3 regions with it's own local language: Galicia, Catalunya and Euskadi).

In this licensing journey the original 23.976fps material uses to get at least one conversion to PAL, and, this you may know, they KILL the picture with a stoooooopid Telecine instead of just converting it with the classic and PROPER speedup to 25fps. Then we end with a crappy image full of ghosting.

To even try to get rid of it you must have the original image in "proper" PAL, with the original interlacing and all that crap. capture cards that give me an already converted image to a 1:1 pixel aspect ratio are of no use in this case. It would be for a film as they are converted to PAL in the PROPER way, but not for anime and other few materials, and this is what I am interested in, so I need the adecuate hardware... but I don't think I could afford it.

Respect to getting it from the "source", I don't think I have any contacts. If it was that easy I'm sure there would already be some people posting the galician audio files somewhere, as there's a lot of people wanting them here.

I could also just capture the audio part of the show (wich I can do nicely with much less expensive hardware) and then do some editing and synchronizing to put them together with the image from DVD after some processing, but I would like to record the show while the airwaves are still public domain here, as DVD material is not.

Asf or the space needed for lossless capture. Those files, Obviously, are not final, it's a temporary file to encode in a more "final production friendly" format like MPEG4, and anyway, There's only going to be 2 or 4 episodes each weekend, so I have eough time to take care of those BIG files and encode them.

Enough ranting for now.

Any more ideas?

[Arachnotron]

How poor is that poor desktop of yours?

[radorn]

athlon 800mhz
256mb sdram (2x128 - one pc133 and the other pc125)
an ati xpert 2000 with TV out
sound blaster 128 pci
40gb hd seagate ata133 (but motherboard is older than the disk and has only ata66)

I have no proof, but I think the mainboard slows down all the system because of not only low specs, but I think it has something broken.
I tried some captures with a webcam with virtualdub's speed capture test. The cam was set at 640x480@15fps (maximum camera performance) and tried both RGB an i420 colorspaces.
Results were pretty disastrous, less than 10fps average. and yes, I tried with a clean installation (win2kpro) and also made sure nothing else was sucking CPU or memory. I couldnt get better results.

I bet it is not a good machine for capturing, I have to thoroughly update it.

Thanks for the interest anyway, but I think is hopeless.

[Arachnotron]

Actually, apart from the harddisk space, that should be enough to cap from a pci TV card as long as you don't use a cpu intensive codec. People were already capping full res PAL when an athlon 800 was state of the art.

Capping with vdub from a USB webcam? Ouch!! vdub is a vfw application, and it's performance with wdm drivers is irratic at best. Besides, an older athlon board probably has a via chipset, which means a crap USB port. So I would not judge the old beast by this test. Just for giggles, try it again using virtualVCR. (and preferably, with something else than a USB device)

The reason I ask is that from your remarks in this thread I get the impression what you are looking for is an internal device that by some miracle fit's inside your laptop :) Most external devices also do hardware compression.

Mind, there are a few external devices that can do uncompressed. I once owned a Terratec grabster 200, which could do that over USB2. It had no tuner though, and I had some audio sync problems with it. I believe there also exists a version with a tuner included. There were a few other brands that had devices like that. Belkin for one IIRC.

[pelmen]

just about the getting a good copy from the "source". its easy but it costs money, which is why the warez scene isn't flooded with a copy of everything in existance (yet :) ) The TV stations licence the right to broadcast a particular program...that licence might include the number of times the program can be broadcast for the lifetime of the licence, the timespan during which the program can be broadcast (eg anytime in the next 2 years), and may even include the rights to resell the program which would mean they are allowed to copy the program from their master tapes to whatever format the licence allows and sell that copy. TV stations all have proper pal/ntsc/etc converters. Sometimes the organization who does the regional translations/subtitling on programs that weren't translated by the originators will retain (as part of their translating agreement) the right to sell the translated versions within the region it was translated for.

So all you have to do is pick up a phone book, ring the TV station and get onto someone who can find out if they are allowed to make a copy for you in the format YOU want and how much it costs. Takes less time to check this than it does to wait around for forum replies :)

And of course depends if the program is something you are willing to pay for or not. If it exists to be broadcast then someone somewhere has the rights to sell you a legal copy of it and its usually not too much effort to find out.

good luck