ATI Capture

[NixNeon]

I have an ati capture card which do full motion mpeg2. I also have Ulead Video which can capture direct to mpeg2. If I connect my dvd player to the card and us Ulead to go direct Mpeg2 should I get quality as high as if i ripped the dvd and re-encoded? I have a 1900 atholon with half a gig of ram. The output will be displayed on a tv out.

[dar1us]

no - your DVD player will output at analogue, wasting quality converting it back to digital.

why dont you rip on the PC entirely?

[cjv]

Also, the ATI card has Macrovision protection, so you can't record a DVD through the capture card. dar1us is right, though, why would you want to when you can get a perfect digital rip using DVD Decrypter or Smartripper or something?

cjv

[dar1us]

As always:)

Or at least as I like to thing!

/me Stress the 'I':)

[NixNeon]

The reason I wanted to try this was that ripping is fine, but the re-encoding can be a pain it you don't get it right. You see if it were up to me I would just play from the VOB files. They are DVD quality and space or putting the movie on disc is not one of my concerns. Everything will be stored on a large server. Now I know I can play the VOB files but here is the catch, I use Media Center Edition so everything must be in one file not many and that file has to be playable in Media Player. I can get a VOB to play in WMP but I need them in one big file. Re-encoding takes away quality and the only purpose is really size and I don't care about that.
I use Gknodt and it gives me good results but I Still have problems with it and I've read all the guides.

[cjv]

You can use DVD Decrypter and set it to create on big VOB file.

You can also use CCE with 1-pass VBR, which will cut the file size drastically. It should work in above real-time on your machine, so a 2 hour movie won't take that long at all. If you use a low Q value, then the quality loss will not be noticable, and you will save a few gigs at least.

cjv