inuyasha
18th December 2002, 14:24
Preface: I am going to outline here the process I use to capture PAL Digital cable using my Hauppauge WinTV DVB-C card. This is not really a question, but I am open to comments. Hopefully this might also help someone using a Technotrend derivative DVB card trying to find out how to capture.
I assume you have allready installed the card, drivers and applications for your card and can see TV programs with it.
The quick way:
1. Set up your TV application ie. HighendTV.exe to capture in PVA format and start capturing.
The reason I decided to use PVA instead the other option mpeg-2 is that PVA seems to be the closest thing to the real transport stream you can get out of this hardware http://www.technotrend.de/download/av_format_v1.pdf.
Second reason was that there was 2 very nice utilities for PVA (PVACut, PVAstrumento) and I failed to find programs that would do similar operations to MPEG-2 format properly.
I personally use progDVB (http://www.progdvb.com) to capture. It's supposed to work better than other programs in capturing and not produce too many frame drops. If a program is badly written the memory overflows will result in frame drops in long sessions. There's also a setting where you can easily define the priority of the program. I set it Above normal. The newest versions are kind of beta's and might not even work with DVB-C cards and it's not too easy to set up. Refer to http://www.tforums.com/viewforum.php?f=12 if you have problems.
2. We use PVACut (http://www.tirtanium.de/extra.html) to cut out the addvertisements and PVAStrumento (http://www.offeryn.de/dv.htm) to convert and demux the PVA file to MPEG-2 video and audio files.
In PVACut the only setting I have changed is "Audio time pvaassemble endoffset in ms" to 0 (They say to put this to 0 for PVAStrumento so I obey ;)
If you do not feel the need to demux you can also save the file to MPEG-2 PS file and continue to convert it to proper SVCD or author DVD off it.
3. Convert the mpeg-2 files to divx using Doom9's conversion guide (http://www.doom9.org/index.html?/svcd2divx.htm). I use Divx5 so you need also this guide (http://www.doom9.org/index.html?/gknot-main3.htm).
In this guide is provided step by step instructions how to convert
SVCD ie. MPEG-2 to divx and since we have mpeg-2 files to convert we can use it from the DVD2AVI step.
Since I capture PAL I just check Field DEinterlace and neutral bi-cubic resize that pops when you click "Save & Encode".
There is also another software than supposedly can help a lot and is also designed for DVB converting ie. DVX (http://www.planetdvb.net/dvx/), but it's a bit alien to me so I use Gordian Knot which I have learned.
4. After completing the Doom9 guides for converting SVCD with the codec you choose you're done and you have succeeded in creating a divx (or whatever) conversion of your captured material.
This is a very quick procedure and if the source quality is good you also will get good results.
But as we know MPEG-2 compression has macroblocks which become visible occasionally in fast moving scenes. Also MPEG compression is sensitive to noise and for example in cartoon and anime you can see Chrome? noise in areas that should be clear and also near clear lines.
In order to battle this you can use filters (http://shelob.mordor.net/dgraft/) in step 3.
For example I am now converting cartoon which had some noise in it. I used Gordian Knot to produce Avisynth script (avs where I deinterlaced and cropped it), which I then loaded to virtualdub and used several virtualdub filters from Donald Graft (http://shelob.mordor.net/dgraft/) to reduce the noice. I followed Poopity Poop's (http://web.syr.edu/~tjmyers/animefilters.html) setup adding temporal smoother filter right after resize and fidled with the settings until I was happy enough with the result.
I know all the virtualdub part could be also done directly using Avisynth (I understand it can use virtualdub filters too.), but I think Virtualdub provided a nice tool to see the source deinterlaced on 1 window and the result of the filters I am using to clear the picture in the other.
Happy capturing, Inuyasha
I assume you have allready installed the card, drivers and applications for your card and can see TV programs with it.
The quick way:
1. Set up your TV application ie. HighendTV.exe to capture in PVA format and start capturing.
The reason I decided to use PVA instead the other option mpeg-2 is that PVA seems to be the closest thing to the real transport stream you can get out of this hardware http://www.technotrend.de/download/av_format_v1.pdf.
Second reason was that there was 2 very nice utilities for PVA (PVACut, PVAstrumento) and I failed to find programs that would do similar operations to MPEG-2 format properly.
I personally use progDVB (http://www.progdvb.com) to capture. It's supposed to work better than other programs in capturing and not produce too many frame drops. If a program is badly written the memory overflows will result in frame drops in long sessions. There's also a setting where you can easily define the priority of the program. I set it Above normal. The newest versions are kind of beta's and might not even work with DVB-C cards and it's not too easy to set up. Refer to http://www.tforums.com/viewforum.php?f=12 if you have problems.
2. We use PVACut (http://www.tirtanium.de/extra.html) to cut out the addvertisements and PVAStrumento (http://www.offeryn.de/dv.htm) to convert and demux the PVA file to MPEG-2 video and audio files.
In PVACut the only setting I have changed is "Audio time pvaassemble endoffset in ms" to 0 (They say to put this to 0 for PVAStrumento so I obey ;)
If you do not feel the need to demux you can also save the file to MPEG-2 PS file and continue to convert it to proper SVCD or author DVD off it.
3. Convert the mpeg-2 files to divx using Doom9's conversion guide (http://www.doom9.org/index.html?/svcd2divx.htm). I use Divx5 so you need also this guide (http://www.doom9.org/index.html?/gknot-main3.htm).
In this guide is provided step by step instructions how to convert
SVCD ie. MPEG-2 to divx and since we have mpeg-2 files to convert we can use it from the DVD2AVI step.
Since I capture PAL I just check Field DEinterlace and neutral bi-cubic resize that pops when you click "Save & Encode".
There is also another software than supposedly can help a lot and is also designed for DVB converting ie. DVX (http://www.planetdvb.net/dvx/), but it's a bit alien to me so I use Gordian Knot which I have learned.
4. After completing the Doom9 guides for converting SVCD with the codec you choose you're done and you have succeeded in creating a divx (or whatever) conversion of your captured material.
This is a very quick procedure and if the source quality is good you also will get good results.
But as we know MPEG-2 compression has macroblocks which become visible occasionally in fast moving scenes. Also MPEG compression is sensitive to noise and for example in cartoon and anime you can see Chrome? noise in areas that should be clear and also near clear lines.
In order to battle this you can use filters (http://shelob.mordor.net/dgraft/) in step 3.
For example I am now converting cartoon which had some noise in it. I used Gordian Knot to produce Avisynth script (avs where I deinterlaced and cropped it), which I then loaded to virtualdub and used several virtualdub filters from Donald Graft (http://shelob.mordor.net/dgraft/) to reduce the noice. I followed Poopity Poop's (http://web.syr.edu/~tjmyers/animefilters.html) setup adding temporal smoother filter right after resize and fidled with the settings until I was happy enough with the result.
I know all the virtualdub part could be also done directly using Avisynth (I understand it can use virtualdub filters too.), but I think Virtualdub provided a nice tool to see the source deinterlaced on 1 window and the result of the filters I am using to clear the picture in the other.
Happy capturing, Inuyasha