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View Full Version : Max Quality: Can direct MPEG2 capture match AVI->MPEG2 ?

MarcioAB
18th December 2005, 17:38
Hello, I have a no-Mpeg2 hardware accelerated capture board connected to a VCR player and some personal VCR tapes that I want to translate and get the highest quality (as possible) with the resources I have here (the 2 options below), but I do not want to waste resources if I have not.

1- I can capture/output Mpeg2 directly with PowerVCR II at 9 Mbit/s, all I-frames, 720x480, max quality, with no drops. I assume that is be highest quality I can get capturing directly on Mpeg2.

2- I can capture compressed lossless AVI with VirtualVCR at 720x480 and encode with TMPGEnc (3.0) at 9 Mbit/s with "Motion Search Precision = Highest" , consuming far more resources than 1st option, but ...

I can notice the 2nd option is (little) better than the 1st (blurry, specially).

Considering only quality, is that a "no question understanding" that the 2nd option is always (little) better ?

Any comment is very welcome.
Thank you
setarip_old
18th December 2005, 18:14
Hi!
encode with TMPGEnc (3.0) at 9 Mbit/s with "Motion Search Precision = Highest" , consuming far more resources
My own experience with TMPGEnc has led me to use "Normal" setting for this, rather than "Highest". I see no loss of quality by doing this and it reduces the processing time significantly...
Video Dude
19th December 2005, 02:27
1- I can capture/output Mpeg2 directly with PowerVCR II at 9 Mbit/s, all I-frames, 720x480, max quality, with no drops. I assume that is be highest quality I can get capturing directly on Mpeg2.

2- I can capture compressed lossless AVI with VirtualVCR at 720x480 and encode with TMPGEnc (3.0) at 9 Mbit/s with "Motion Search Precision = Highest" , consuming far more resources than 1st option, but ...

I can notice the 2nd option is (little) better than the 1st (blurry, specially).
The 2nd option looks better because the TMPGEnc encoder is more optimized for quality. The PowerVCR encoder is most likely optimized for speed (on the fly capture), rather than being optimized for quality.

I would suggest setting the Motion Search to high.