Replace my old tired Capture - WANT MASSIVE RES.

[ExtraBit]

Hello. Looking for advice. I have skimmed through the forums so i hope i don't ask the same question as previously.

In from Australia and we do not have a huge array of brand names that get mentioned here, but would be willing to purchase from overseas. I have an old tired Tv Excel (BT878+ Chipset) Capture Device. I have been happily playing with capturing @ 352x288, and creating some good VCD quality discs. Of course with SVCD and DVD becoming more usable, i want a capture device that can capture right up into the DVD resolutions (704x576) and i am unsure of the best way to go.
Sound isn't important as i record the sound seperately through my Audigy card, and all the bells and whistles like remotes and FM are also not important. I just wish to capture off TV in higher than 352x288 res so i can burn captured images onto DVD with it in the correct format. What is very important though is SOFTWARE. I generally dislike software than comes with capture devices and would MUCH prefer to use VirtualDub for the task, so i could hope it would be completely compatible to capture in these higher resolutions in VD.

Of course i would hope that if i'm only required to do VCD then it would still do 352x288.

I have a P4 1.6Ghz, 1gig RDram, 160gig (7200 8mb). Is this enough power to capture 704x576 @ 25FPS.

Winhaupagge looks nice and available here in Australia but will take other suggestions happily.

Thanks.

[fasttimes]

Just use the BTWinCap drivers with your BT878 card! Do a search for the home page. If you need a DirectShow based capture app, look into VirtualDub. You're on your way.

[cjv]

Originally posted by ExtraBit
I have a P4 1.6Ghz, 1gig RDram, 160gig (7200 8mb). Is this enough power to capture 704x576 @ 25FPS.
Definately.

You know that you can't capture straight to MPEG2 in VDub, though, so you will have to capture in MJPEG or HuffYUV and encode to MPEG2 (much better quality in the long run).

I would just stick with your current capture card, and try capturing to high res MJPEG and then transcode. I bet you will be pretty happy.

cjv

[ExtraBit]

Hi Guys, thanks for your replies. I have already progressed quite far.

I have always used MJPEG @ 100% quality for capture.

I went and grabbed those different drivers and installed them. Went into VD and set the res to 704x576 (Switched over Preview :() and it captured..BUT i get a bad picture. If i lower the resolution, everything works fine, but in the high res. the image (this isn't easy to explain)...The image i was testing was a cricket match. People in white uniforms, and the grass was kinda cutting into the white uniforms the guys were wearing, i'm not sure what you call this. I checked the capture after i made it and it was in there was well so it was just a "preview" thing. Seems to happen mostly with movement, but other movement seemed fine, so i guess it seems to be movement vs colour clashing. Could post a screenie somewhere if you do not know what i mean.

Otherwise, so far, thankyou for your help, i don't think even the crppy little manual (Piece of paper) said it could support higher res than 352x288.

P.S. What's transcode? Is that afancy way of saying Encode with TMPGenc?

Ivan

[Airw0lf]

So now that you are capturing at 704 x 576, are you using HuffYUV as your codec? If so, you might want to try setting the Field Threshold in the HuffYUV settings to 576. The default as I recall is 288. I capture at 720 x 576 using an ATI All in Wonder 128, so I don't know if there is a hardware issue at fault. I am using is huffyuv0.2.2.rar, which I got from doom's download section. This is a slightly different version to the "official" release I think. Returning to the hardware in question, I think that if you can get a nice looking preview at 704 x 576, you should be able to capture it no sweat.

Anyway, hope I could help...

NB: It's not always worth capturing at resolutions > 640 x 480 on some hardware. Some cards have a "true" max of 640 x 480, and even though they allow higher capture resolutions, the capture is basically 640 x 480 frames being stretched. Dunno if that applies to your card though...

[ExtraBit]

Yikes! This is getting more complicated than i thought. Again, thanks for your replies.

No i was still using MJPEG as compression has never been an issue and in terms of pic quality, MJEG gave me a picture i was very happy with. Should i consider Huffy. I have it installed from when i first tried it (V2.1.1) and will happily consider trying out this hacked version.

I did a capture at 640x480 to see if i could remove this strange image corruption i'm getting, and again, i switch back to 352x288 and it works perfect.
I have uploaded to my own server (Don't hit it hard, i pay for the download) a good cap at 352x288 and a BADCAP at 640x480 so maybe someone will recognise the bad feature and know how it can be fixed.
http://users.bigpond.net.au/extra-bit/BADCAP.jpg
There is also
http://users.bigpond.net.au/extra-bit/GOODCAP.jpg
this will show a stand cap and the decent picture i expect.
I have this feeling the card just wasn't mean tto do this res and i will still end up requireing a new card and that i'm only achieving this res in the first place by bending the rules using these new drivers. I also doubt this is due to the compression being used as i can see this problem happening while just previewing the image and not capturing.

Also it seems that i can only overlay if 352x288, anything bigger and i MUST use Preview, and i expected this as i actually read through the READ ME of the drivers and it said this.

Thanks again. New Card boys? Or better software yet to try?

[Mike456]

Do you mean the interlacing artefacts? The lines are horizontally arn't they? That is because on the TV 50 half pictures per sec. are "transfered" (first the odd ones, then the even ones) and you record them to 25 full pictures. If you capture with 288 lines you doesn't see them, because you only use capturing the odd or the even lines. In this case I recommend you to download SmartDeinterlacer and to deinterlace the video before encoding to mpeg1/2. Some people might say that this is not nessesery for svcds but it is much easier for the encoder to encode non interlaced videos. If you don't want to deinterlace it to get on the TV 50 fps instead of 25 you need a very high data rate otherwise it doesn't look very good.

[Airw0lf]

I think Mike456 is right in asking whether what you're concerned with is the interlacing. I can't see anything else "wrong" as such with your "bad" capture. The way to get rid of those fine comb-like lines is to send your video through a deinterlacing filter before encoding. What I tend to do is load up the video in virtualdub, the a deinterlace filter (using blend fields), crop, resize and then frameserve to encode the video. In the end, interlacing effects are pretty much unavoidable if you capture with 576 lines at 25 fps. You could try 50 fps, but that would be a little overkill I think...

[Herske]

Hello,

The "badcap" looks good enough, some rainbow artifacts, but quite ok for a broadcast capture.

As the other posters clearly said, what you're seeing there are the interlace "artifacts", use any good deinterlacer to get rid of it (decomb if you use avisynth, smart deinterlace or whatever for VirtualDub).

Unfortunately, VirtualDub does not capture natively with DirectShow, it uses the wdm-vfw wrapper which is rather buggy and unstable. You should use a DirectShow based app for capture, such as VirtualVCR or iuVCR.

I'm using btwincap drivers + VirtualVCR, capping at 768x576, mjpeg or huffyuv, on an 80GB NTFS hdd. Works great!

[windibus]

try again without filters and the option swap fields enabled in vdub

[wotef]

australia is PAL, right? to cap "at massive res", you MUST CAP AT 576 vertical - NOT 480...resize to whatever you want later on, but CAP at 576, then deinterlace

i'd probably use tomsmocomp to deinterlace this

[ExtraBit]

Hmmm, well very interesting. I have cut down my work when i dub from TV to only doing the capture in VD and then the resulting AVI is placed straight into TMPgenc for VCD encoding. IF ads need to be removed, i use the source range and "cut" out the ads using that. I use Antenna TV and usually do a noise reduction and sharpen image filter. The movie usually comes out looking pretty good.

It seems to use higher res wll involve going back to my old skool ways of producing movies by using multiple software solutions, each doing its own part, and i have much more work to do to get there. Good example is the encoding bitrate when in higher resolutions, i have no idea (I'm sure there are posts elsewhere. Point is, i found my solution, which is, i don't need a new card :) Thanks to the guys who helped me out here, and those new drivers are brilliant, before i could even capture, i use to have to load up my TV software before Virtual dub could even see my Capture Card, now the new drivers let me load directly into VD with no errors.