Capturing TV - PC based or standalone ?

[rca29]

For the last 2 years, i've been using the pc to backup dvd's, played with tools as Scenarist, DVDMaestro, CCE... ...with excellent and successful results (thanks Domm9).

But there's something that i never could do successfully in the pc - Capturing Video (using it as a VCR).
A couple of years ago, i bought a Pinnacle PCTV Pro, followed all the guides i found, tried every piece of software, but i was never able to capture at 720x576 with perfect audio sync.
I ended up buying a Canopus ADVC 1394, which i connected to a standalone stereo VCR and finally got perfect audio sync. There's a few problems with this approach, such as timed recordings and video quality.
The Canopus converts the analogue signal to DV, and then i use CCE to convert to mpeg-2, which leads to 2 compression steps applied on the signal.

When the source isn't perfect (analogue cable tv), i can see some artifacts of the compression.

Recently, i gave another try to capture cards, bought an Avermedia TV tuner card ( i couldn't find a Hauppauge PVR-150 for sale), and i can only get synced captures using it's own software (it's not that good) and Intervideo WinDVR.

I don't have any problems with audio sync now, but both software do something terrible (IMHO) to the image, called de-interlacing. De-interlacing TV shows is IMO a bad thing to do (at least in the way this software does it), if you want to see it later on TV (as i do), because i loose the smoothness of motion, which i find very anoying, to say the least.

So my question goes to anyone with experience with standalone DVD recorders vs PC:

A hard-drive based DVD recorder has a similar price (today) as my canopus ADVC 1394, and does the mpeg-2 conversion by a dedicated and good (?) hardware encoder, with a good built-in tuner.
On the other hand, A/V sync in pc's are still found by trial and error, both in software and hardware setups (it's probably THE big problem with pc's), which can easily be proved by the number of questions around this issue in forums.

So i would like to know if a current standalone DVD recorder has a good quality with less than perfect analogue signals, and if a Hauppauge PVR-150 (as an example, as it has a hardware encoder) has any chance of being as good (regarding video/sound quality) as a standalone, or if there are any "proven" setups for pc that actually work as well as a standalone.

My goal is to record tv-shows to watch on tv, in interlaced video, and then compile it to dvd-r.
I've already spent too much money trying to do this simple task on pc, and i'm seriously thinking about changing to the 'old' standalone option, but i have 2 pc's (XP 1800 and Athlon 6 3000+) in a room where i spend a lot of my free time, so i could use some help and suggestions.

Thank you all

[rca29]

As I couldn’t get any reply to this post, I ended up buying a standalone dvd recorder (Sony RDR-HX510) yesterday, and I’m replying to anyone who might have this question in mind.

IMO, this is the best replacement for a VCR, and computers still have a long way to go in order to achieve this task.

This reminds me of what happened with backing up audio cd’s…
Back in 1999, I bought my first pc cdr, and I tried a lot of software to do the simple task of backing up a audio cd, but the software at that time (including nero and other more ‘audio oriented’ software) failed at achieving this task with 100% of success.
Sometimes, I would get a little click here and there, or a skip. This didn’t happened all the time, or with all cd’s, but making a backup of a audio cd was always a matter of luck.
As a result, I ended up buying a standalone audio CD-R recorder, which always led me to 100% accurate results (from an audible point of view).

Today, I don’t use it anymore (except for converting analogue to digital), as tools such as Exact Audio Copy are 100% accurate for this task.

I feel that capturing video in PC’s are still in that point of development, where you’ll have a hard time finding a successful setup for capturing (at the consumer level products).

What happened to me back in 1999, happened again yesterday.
The standalone recorder is a bullet-proof way of capturing video, with better tuner devices than the average TV card, easy operation, perfect time-shift, and all those nice features such as filters that helps to increase the quality of the recording from bad sources in real time.

Recording in VBR SP mode (about 4300 average bitrate – according to bitrate viewer), I don’t see any artifacts in the image, with the exception of fast fade in/ fade out’s where I can see some macroblock noise. In any other circumstances, such as high movement scenes, I can’t see any of it. IMO, this isn’t too bad, as we’re talking about a bitrate that isn’t very high, with a grainy channel as a source and interlaced recording.
But this recorder has better quality options (until a bitrate around 15 mbit), so it’s a matter of choice from the user.
Editing (cut unwanted parts, placing chapters, etc) is very easy, and I can do it all from my coach, and then burn it to dvd in a fast way.

Just for testing purposes, I recorded the channel Bloomberg, which always has letters sliding. In the pc, this sliding is more like little ‘jumps’, but the recorded dvd-r played on a regular tv is still ultra-smooth – something that I never was able to get in a pc, and that only some plasma / lcd tv’s are able to do.

My final conclusion is that tv cards are good if you plan to capture and watch on pc, without too many worries about quality, but if you want a replacement for a vcr, you have to buy one, which is the standalone dvd recorder - not a pc working under windows, with buggy drivers and software all around the system.

Pc’s have the potential to do better, but unless you buy some kind of expensive package of hardware and software specifically designed to do that, it will always be a major headache…

They’re great for encoding, authoring and a lot of other things. CCE quality is very hard to beat by a hardware encoder, but we’re talking about capturing video…

Cheers

[cwk]

Thanks for these posts rca29,

I have been thinking about using a dvd recorder for several months. I may just give one a try.

cwk

[phædrus]

If the circuitry of a DVD-recorder can create a "bullet-proof" data stream for recording on a DVD-R, I can see no reason why a standalone hardware encoder for a PC can't make such a datastream suitable for saving on your hard disc, and then subsequently editing and burning that with known reliable tools. Why is there no such reliable option? If problems are the rule, rather than the exception, then the PC card manufacturers are to be blamed. Why aren't their customers writing them and telling them the products need to go back to the drawing board?

I have to say I'm appalled with the quality of the TV show caps that my friends have been downloading from the internet. They're all deinterlaced, as RCA29 notes. But not decimated! What kind of brains do the designers of these cards have? Very small ones, it seems. If you can't do deinterlacing right, don't do it at all.

[rca29]

Why is there no such reliable option? If problems are the rule, rather than the exception, then the PC card manufacturers are to be blamed. Why aren't their customers writing them and telling them the products need to go back to the drawing board?

IMHO, i guess that there are a number of reasons for this:

1) Most Tv-Capture cards are cheap, and need to be cheap.
The big market for these cards seems to be around the 40 - 60 € mark. I tried to buy the Hauppauge PVR-150, but the Portuguese distributor didn't have it. When i asked for the PVR-250 or above, they told me that they usually don't have it in stock. So, if i want to buy a PVR-250 (Around 200 €) i have to order it and wait 15 days. To top this, i can't try the card before spending 200 € on it, has there isn't any for demo.

They always have the cheaper ones in stock, because that's where sales are...

While i still think that this is stupid (i didn't buy a PVR 150 because they didn't have it, and Sony sold another standalone...), i have to understand that spending 200 € on a Tv Card for PC can be tricky.
Why would i buy a Tv Card for the same price of a Standalone device ? When you're capturing on the pc, the best thing you can do is avoid touching in that pc. With a standalone, you can have the pc doing another task, while you're watching your recorded program on the TV.

2) Tv Cards need to be compatible with different versions of windows, drivers, service packs, processor power, etc.
You won't notice this problem (at least in the same amplitude) with a Hard Drive, a soundcard, or a DVD-ROM (-+R/RW...).
Before buying any product, i always try to find reviews and surveys on the product i want, and i must say that i never returned any pc product except for capture cards.

3) The average buyer/user of a TV card is interessed on viewing tv in the pc monitor and record a show now and then. If the card does it (even with low quality), then it works fine (for most people). Capturing at 320x276 in mpeg 1 isn't such a hard task, and it's fine for most people, but IMO it's far worse than VHS.


What kind of brains do the designers of these cards have? Very small ones, it seems. If you can't do deinterlacing right, don't do it at all.

When one buys a tv card for pc, the software has to deinterlace the signal. Even the average Joe would complain if he was watching tv (or captured shows) with the lines of interlacing all over the screen.
But they could let you record as interlaced material and then let the software player deinterlace it as a regular DVD.

[E-Male]

IMO, this is the best replacement for a VCR, and computers still have a long way to go in order to achieve this task.
might be true, but only if you are stuck with analoge
a dvb-s/c card IMO beats a stand-alone-recorder by far in terms of auality

[zilog jones]

I've never had serious problems with analogue captures. I've used a Hauppage WinTV PCI-FM and my own Pinnacle PCTV Stereo (Philips chipset) - these were both around €60-80 and just offer direct YUY2 video output - none of that hardware MPEG encoding junk or conversion to/from DV, which I don't want as I'll be editing/filtering/whatever the video before I put it onto a DVD video or DivX/XviD - therefore I lose as little quality as possible as I use high quality MJPEG or Huffyuv when capturing - only downside is you need A LOT of space...

[rca29]

I've never had serious problems with analogue captures. I've used a Hauppage WinTV PCI-FM and my own Pinnacle PCTV Stereo (Philips chipset) - these were both around €60-80 and just offer direct YUY2 video output - none of that hardware MPEG encoding junk or conversion to/from DV, which I don't want as I'll be editing/filtering... ...I lose as little quality as possible as I use high quality MJPEG or Huffyuv when capturing - only downside is you need A LOT of space...

IMO, the need for a lot of space is a minor issue. I have several 160 GB HD laying around, and i did captures that way in the past (without any success regarding A/V sync in long captures).
But can you do a 3 hour capture at 720x576 without problems such as audio sync ?
Can you do it everytime you want ? (i mean 100% success rate)

Even if you are that lucky, you still have the editing, filtering, and encoding steps, and that takes a LOT of time.

before I put it onto a DVD video or DivX/XviD - therefore I lose as little quality as possible


So, you capture with all the resolution and minimum compression in order to get the best possible image, and then compress it into DivX/XviD ??? :confused:
Even in your best solution, you are still compressing it to MPEG-2, so what's the point of spending hours doing something that you can do in less than 15 minutes, burning included (end up with your tv show on dvd-r, without the commercials, etc) ?

[CWR03]

Have you taken into account that a lot of the mid-priced capture devices have on-the-fly encoding? I have a cheap Creative device that does, and it takes almost no resources to operate, other than writing chunks to the hard drive. The drawback is that I'm limited to MPEG-2 with its own software - I can use it with other programs as direct capture, but it's such a cheap card that there's no improved quality over DVD-compliant MPEG-2.

[rca29]

I must confess i didn't knew capture cards from creative.
After reading your reply, i did a search on the web, and videohelp.com where i found some reviews. I found the 'Creative Labs Video Blaster Digital VCR', which has mpeg-2 hardware encoding, and yet you can see that most users are strugling with it in order to avoid a lot of issues, including audio sync.
I'm still amazed how this can happen in a Hardware encoding device...

Another point here is the quality of the image. Does it record interlaced shows in interlaced format, or does the card de-interlaces as badly as the examples i that i have ?

When i started this thread, i was wondering if the PC was a good option as a replacement for a standalone DVD-Recorder. I bought the standalone and got the answer.

With a pc, if you're lucky and spend a lot of time playing with software, drivers, etc., you might be able to configure your pc as a good Digital VCR.
If you record into an uncompressed (or almost) format, and then apply all the filtering, good encoding (such as CCE) you will have an excellent capture - and that's the only advantage i see over a standalone.

But that better quality means a lot of time since the capture of the AVI until the finished DVD-R.

I haven't tested every pc cards with hardware mpeg-2 encoding, but the ones i tested were far from having a good image quality when compared to the results of a standalone recorder. (Keep in mind that i'm always talking about analogue reception).

IMO, a VCR (or a replacement) is intended for recording tv shows, which can happen quite often, so i don't want to spend hours editing, (encoding, authoring, etc) in order to have it on DVD, when i can have a device that does it for me in a few minutes, with better quality than cheap tv cards, with less (none) troubles.

[CWR03]

The Creative VideoBlaster only captures 240 height, which eliminates any deinterlacing problems since it doesn't capture the interlaced portions. Of course that also means reduced quality. I only bought it for its PVR abilities which is adequate overall, but I do save and encode some of the programs. I have no audio synch problems going straight to DVD, but when encoding to XviD I'll usually have some audio drift with Gordian Knot.

[Mug Funky]

the following stuff is more than a little technical, and probably not all that useful...

main problem with AV sync is due to the fact that you're recording video and audio with 2 separate devices, and with 2 separate approaches - a TV card and a sound card.

the video signal isn't always exactly 25fps (or 30/1.001 for the more backward of countries :)), so a TV decoder uses a PLL (phase-lock loop) to effectively wrench it's own clock into sync with the TV signal. in contrast, a sound card just takes an analog signal and digitises it at a fixed sampling rate (48khz for DVD). unlike video, there's no sync pulses to grab hold of in analog audio, and a sound card wouldn't know what to do with them even if they were there (they'd sound terrible anyway). this means the sound will go at a different speed to the video. the captured video will be exactly 25fps, but the audio will be at the true speed that the broadcast was at.

the problem is made worse by the fact that every clock on every sound/TV card runs at a different speed. it may be recording 48000 samples per second, but what it thinks is a second might actually be 0.99 seconds or 1.01 seconds of real time. worse still, this speed varies with heat and other factors.

the only way for AV sync to be achieved in hardware is for the sound card to have a wordclock input on it so it can be slaved to the TV capture card's own (probably varying) wordclock. obviously the TV card would also need a wordclock output on it. i'm not aware of any consumer/prosumer level cards that would bother with such a feature (pro audio gear has it, but pro video gear just uses a reference video signal that is common between all the stuff in the chain).

however, clever enough software will dynamically resample audio when it detects it's out of sync with the video. this is a trivial matter - keep track of the reported lengths of both video and audio, and keep a long enough audio buffer that it can resample the audio on the fly. this will reduce quality, but not by much. i believe virtualVCR does this.

the canopus ADVC boxes (quite nice though they are) will keep AV sync by dropping or adding blank samples every frame. this will give an annoying continuous "clickle" in your audio that can be partially removed with a decent audio editor (though it will leave some slightly audible fuzzy crap behind). with a source that's at the right speed, the clicking wont appear (even 10 year old VHS, unless the tape has stretched or it was dubbed badly). [edit] another pitfall of ADVC boxes is that you can't set a recording level - a badly mastered tape or a too-loud TV channel (this is illegal at the levels i'm talking about btw, for obvious reasons) will overload and clip like buggery and give you unusable audio that hurts your ears.

of course, if TV cards had sound chips on them, there wouldn't be a problem with AV sync. here's hoping they start integrating decent sound chips in new TV cards, or at the very least allow the TV card to be linked somehow with the audio card so they can share a common wordclock.

[mg262]

Some months back, I ran across some software that claimed to solve the sync problem perfectly for a particular card by using custom drivers and using one timer (presumably that on the capture card) for both audio and video. Unfortunately, I didn't noted down and I haven't been able to find the software homepage again.

IIRC, the software was shareware, and the first word of the program name was the same as the first word of the card. I think it was a SAA7134-based card. Does anyone know what I'm talking about?

Edit: probably this...
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=700633#post700633

Even if you are that lucky, you still have the editing, filtering, and encoding steps, and that takes a LOT of time.Some of us find that the quality gain is worth it :).

Depends on how much you're capturing, how important it is to you, whether the source is likely to be superseded, how good you are at filtering, how long your source episodes/segments are, etc. I agree that careful processing followed by heavy compression seems a little pointless... but no one mentioned low bitrates, just codecs other than MPEG2. I tend to use ~7000 kbps MPEG2, but that's as much because DVDs will playback anywhere as due to good/bad codec properties.