capturing vhs avi too big

[hatetea58]

Ok, so I'm transferring my vhs-c home movies to dvd. I'm capturing with virtualdub 720x480 and huffyuv codec. These tapes are only 30 minutes and they,re getting split up into like 7 or 8 3 1/2 minute 1.93gb avi files. I'm afraid of there being a slight pause in between files. Plus it's filling up my hard drive really fast. Is this because of my codec? Would picvideo be better? I know my resolution is high, but most of the tutorials use this. Plus, I've tried around 320 or 352 or whatever vhs res is, but it didn't look nearly as good. I'm getting like 15gb for a half hour of video. Any advice would be appreciated.

[Ghitulescu]

Uncompressed D1 video would be some 80-90GB per hour. Live happy with 1/3 of this ...

[dannotto]

Huffyuv is a lossless compression codec (compression whithout any loss). In short Huffyuv have the same quality like uncompressed with reduced file size (~30Gb/h versus 75Gb/uncompressed). Lagarith is another lossless codec with better compression but require more CPU power. If you want smaller size use a DV codec like Celocida (13Gb/h). DV compression have loss.

[mariush]

Virtualdub is quite capable of recording the whole 30 minutes in a single file. If it does split them to 1.93 GB avi files, maybe it's because your hard drive uses FAT 32 file system which is limited to 2 GB per file. With NTFS this problem does not exist.
You may also follow a very old tutorial, that was made when FAT32 was more common - nowadays that limitation of 2 GB per file no longer applies with NTFS file systems and big hard drives, so make sure you get the latest STABLE version of Virtualdub from its website and use that instead of old versions: http://virtualdub.sourceforge.net/

HUFFyuv is lossless, that's why it takes so much disk space. A better lossless codec which compresses better but uses slightly more processor to compress is Lagarith, so you might want to try this one out.
After you capture the movies in lossless, unless you want to edit them, you should compress them to a lossy format, for example use x264 with some very high quality settings and high bitrate to preserve as much as possible. For example, download x264.exe , open a command prompt in the same folder and use something like:

x264.exe --pass 1 --preset slower --bitrate 3072 --output "c:\Destination file.mkv" "C:\Huffyuv encoded file.avi"
x264.exe --pass 2 --preset slower --bitrate 3072 --output "c:\Destination file.mkv" "C:\Huffyuv encoded file.avi"

The first line tells x264 to analyze the movie and determine what parts will need more bitrate (disk space) to preserve quality and which parts will need less, so that overall the quality of the movie is better.
The second line tells the x264 to do the actual compression and create "C:\destination file.mkv" on the drive with the compressed movie.

The --bitrate 3072 tells to use up to 3mbps to encode video, combined with 128 kbps MP3, this means a 30 minutes movie will use between 650 and 700 MB of disk space, so it can be burned on a CD for backup. This should be high enough to give good quality on 720x480 but you can increase it for example to 5000 kbps and use 192 kbps MP3 to reach a file size of about 1150 MB, which is one third (1/3) of a DVD.

After you compress the video, you can compress the audio to mp3 using virtualdub or other programs like MeGUI, and combine the video and audio in a single file using MKVToolnix: http://www.bunkus.org/videotools/mkvtoolnix/downloads.html#windows

[Ghitulescu]

Virtualdub is quite capable of recording the whole 30 minutes in a single file. If it does split them to 1.93 GB avi files, maybe it's because your hard drive uses FAT 32 file system which is limited to 2 GB per file. With NTFS this problem does not exist.

It's the old AVI format that has the 2GB limitation, not the FAT32 which has a 4GB limit. :rolleyes:

[mariush]

Yes, you're right. It's 4 GB for the FAT32 file system.

I've actually checked the Virtualdub settings in the meantime and there's a setting there which says a file is closed when it reaches 1900 MB and a new one is created.
This is most likely to make the AVI files as compatible as possible, by using an older version of the format, which is limited to 2 GB.

You should not compress the audio with MP3 at capture time, as I noticed the synchronization is lost when I do that but maybe it's just me. I just record it at PCM lossless (uncompressed), it's only about 190 KB/s anyway.
Oh and if we're talking about sound, test what works better for you, capturing at 44100Hz or at 48000Hz - with my TV tuner, it works better to use 48000 Hz.

Afterwards, if you open the first file it created, Virtualdub will automatically open the next files so it will appear in Virtualdub as a single big video.

With x264.exe, if you install Avisynth you can create an AVS script which combines all 1.9 GB files into one and load that instead of the avi file. For example a script looks like this


film1 = AVISource("C:\Huffyuv compressed movie 1.avi")
film2 = AVISource("C:\Huffyuv compressed movie 2.avi")
film1+film2


If you don't feel like installing Avisynth and writing scripts, you can also open the first huffyuv file in Virtualdub and it will load all the rest automatically. Then set "Direct Stream copy" for video and audio and save the movie again, to generate a single avi file from all the smaller files. You'll just need the disk space. Then feed this big avi file to x264.exe to compress it.