Found something interesting when creating a DVD

[catback]

Just for kicks, I decided to create a DVD from a VHS home video tape yesterday using Ulead’s DVD Movie Factory. I first used my ATI card’s hardware assisted compression to create a DVD compliant MPEG-2 capture file of the tape (I didn't use Ulead for the capture process). I then opened this file in Ulead, verified the correct video format, and created the actual DVD. The video quality was ok but noticeably less than the original VHS tape.

I then took the same tape, captured to Huffyuv at a DVD resolution of 720x480 with CD quality audio and then created a Divx file using Nandub and a high video bit rate of 2500 kbps. I then loaded this divx file into Ulead and used it’s conversion feature to convert the divx file into a DVD compliant MPEG-2 file (great feature by the way!). What I found was that the final video quality of the resulting DVD was greatly improved compared to the first method I used.

Why is that?

I would have thought that going from VHS to Huffyuv to Divx and finally to MPEG-2 would have yielded much worse quality since there are more intermediate conversion steps compared to the first method which went from VHS directly to MPEG-2.

[MvB]

Hi catback,

maybe your hardware compression doesn't use such a high bitrate for the compression as the movie factory or the softcoder from movie factory has a better overall quality than your hardencoder. If it's possible, look for the settings of the hardware and adjust properly.

And if you captured from video, your source was interlaced. I don't think your hardware could do deinterlacing, but i think the factory can. That could be another reason ...

[amirkhan]

ATI card has no h/w assisted encoder. I know I have a AIW card can the ONLY thing hardware assisted about it is that it has some things that HELP in DVD playback. I think its motion compensation from memory.

There is nothing to help with MPEG2 encoding. What you are doing is realtime MPEG encoding with your CPU, VERY VERY hard to do and thats why the results are so poor.

[auenf]

ok, heres your problem:

the DVD profile in the ATI MMC captures to 352x576(or 352x480 for NTSC) which is half width, and 8mbit VBR (i think, might be CBR), what you should do is create your own custom capture mode in ATI MMC, 720x576/480 and 8mbit VBR, altho 6mbit VBR might be ok too, tick deinterlace, thats very nice, and do a capture (you might have to play around with the GOP to stop frame drops, MPEG-2 capture is memory bandwidth limited)

Enf...

[ripped-draws]

if i want to copy near dvd quality from a source i use the pinnacle av device which goes into the usb port and use pinnacle studio 7 which has perfect settings for dvd it works perfect for me it also creates svcd and vcd a.d avis the only draw back is you have to have fast computer with ultra hardrive atleast 30gb which is always the key
i use to use a capture card but i could never find one to work good enough i took a chance a bought this device and has worked perfect exspecialy on satilite which is digital so i get perfect dvd quality and full screen video of movie which has been formated to fit my screen LOL. it cost 49 dollars at circuit city or you nearest computer store. so i dont know how much you are in to getting from a source but i use firewire for my dv camcorder and it is perfect i use a 900 mh laptop and my pc is a 1.4 gig well let us know how it goes



ps:I CAN ONLY GIVE YOU KNOWLEDGE NOT WISDOM:)

[auenf]

well, you wont be able to get D1 video thru the USB port, unless the external device does a hardware encode.

Enf...

[catback]

Since my initial post, I have slightly changed my DVD authoring process. I've had good results with the following method so I suggest others try it as well and see what they think. As a reference, I'm on a 1.2 GHz Athlon, Win98 SE and an ATI AIW 128 Pro video card.

First, capture (in segments) the video using Huff and AVI_IO at 720x480 resolution and 48kHz audio. You will need approximately 30-40 gig per hour of capture.

Open Ulead DVD Movie Factory and load each segment in. This may take a little time if you have several segments but it's only a minor inconvenience.

Use Ulead's batch conversion process to convert each individual AVI segment to a DVD compliant MPEG2 file and join each individual segment to produce a single file.

Create the menu screen which let's you do directly to any part of the video you wish. Ulead makes this process fairly simple.

Create the DVD. You can either burn to a DVD-R if you have such a drive or you can save the files to your hard drive and view them from there. I suggest using ZoomPlayer if you do this.

That's it. I've created several DVD files this way and I was very happy with the results for all of them.