Please recommend a codec for cartoons

[ajmoss]

What would be a good codec to record cartoons such as South Park? It needs to work in real time on a fairly modest computer (550MHz), and produce a bit rate no higher than 4 Mbit/s, preferably a lot less.

Pictures in a cartoon have large areas that are exactly the same colour. A suitable codec should make use of this fact.

[Neo Neko]

You are talking of capture. I am not aware of any codecs that will do quite what you describe on capture. For the cartoons I do I use HuffYUV. It produces some big ass files, but they are of excelent quality. I then deinterlace and filter in virtualdub and output with Xvid. The output when watched on TV looks better than the original brodcast and the final file size and bit rate is way below what you describe. But I have to deal with a large intermediary file inbetween. Bout 15Gb for 30Min. I suppose you could capture to Divx or Xvid, but the quality will not be so hot. Also there is Mjpeg if your card can do that or you have the codec for it.

But it has been my experience that you can not just capture a file and be done with it. I always have to do filtering of some sort after the capture and the bette the source the better the finished AVI.

[anarco]

basically a wavelet codec analyses the picture before compressing it
while specially looking for large areas with the same color
(i.e. jpeg2 images take advantage of this)

I don´t know if it will compress better than divx
you could give picvideo´s wavelet codec a try... however it is not fast enough for compressing while capturing and won´t work for x/vcd/x/svcd

so capturing probably has to be done lossless before to achieve best results...

[takeru]

Originally posted by Neo Neko
For the cartoons I do I use HuffYUV. It produces some big ass files, but they are of excelent quality. I then deinterlace and filter in virtualdub and output with Xvid.

if you capture with huffyuv, its better to ivtc with tmpg before divx'ing. this is from ntsc capture from asus deluxe, so maybe it applies to you as well. if you capture at regular ntsc (29.976) in virtualdub, you can get rid of 99%, sometimes higher, of interlace lines by just choosing the right field order for ivtc (A or B) in tmpg, without the need to deinterlace. after doing auto setting for ivtc in tmpg, and if you chose the right field order, you will definately see what i mean. i have made some excellent high res encodes of south park, futurama, star trek, etc. so i know this well. ;)

[Neo Neko]

For those specific types of sources you are correct. When it comes to most cartoons IVTC of some sort is often necessary. Most animation is 24Fps or less. But most TV sources outside of cartoons do not work this way. The only time you will have need for it outside cartoons is with theatrical or non-made-for-TV movies.

IVTC is a good rule of thumb, but even on some cartoon sources it is not always right.