DivX/XviD TV-Out through DV camcorder

[jkwarras]

Hi,

Anyone knows how to do a TV-Out without a TV-OUt card, just with a DV camcorder plug to the PC and to the TV? I know this tool can do this:

http://icqphone.ru/video2tv/

It works, and if you use the ffdshow resize function or you have a TV with 16:9 mode you can watch you films on your TV; Even with subtitles and OGM files, if you use directvobsub and you specifie it to do a 4:3 scale it will also work; But i don't know how to setup the program, because even if i can watch it, it always run slow, the sound it right but not the video;

I don't know if anyone has already try this tool and knows how to setup the tool, or if there's another way to do this (another freeware or similar program).

Thanks

Superfly

[DDogg]

This program is an absolute jewel! Thanks very much.

As to your question, it would seem to me that this program must re-render "on the fly" in order to output via the ieee. If so, that will require a lot of cpu and ram. It seems to work just fine on my slightly older tbird 1.4 w/ 512 meg 2100 ddr ram. Both DV, mpg and divx will output.

[jkwarras]

Originally posted by DDogg
As to your question, it would seem to me that this program must re-render "on the fly" in order to output via the ieee.

YEah, that's what i was thinking, on my PIII 800Mhz 320Ram i think it's not enough to do it well, but i think it does not re-render the file, but just guessing :)

[DDogg]

...but i think it does not re-render the file, but just guessing

Ieee out to the DVCAM is digital, not analog. It would seem to me that this prog must be doing DV conversion. If not, how else could the camera accept the input? Sure, if the avi is already in DV format, I would expect it just sends that along like any other print to tape utility, but an mpeg or a DIVX??? That would have to be converted. Anyway, as I said, it sure is a cool little prog. It supports drag and drop, so you can just drag a video to the icon on the desktop and it autoplays it out to the DVCam and to a monitor if you have one hooked to the Cam.

[DDogg]

BTW, this little app also works with VFAPI. That means you can directly output your AVS script to TV to view the effects and color fidelity. Obviously, if you have heavy filters in your script you will not get full frame speed. However, the really nice thing is you will get decent motion. Certainly enough to gage your settings. In these cases I do not add sound to my script or use killsound in it. Sound or no sound, it does not seem to effect this app.

[sh0dan]

Does it work without VFAPI? It seems to have Directshow input, so in theory it should.

[DDogg]

I'll be double darned and dipped in goo. It plays an avs file justa fine. I just assumed... yeah, I know about that :o

[BlueCup]

PIII 600mhz 384ram and the video plays fine but the audio skips alot. On the first clips I tried they had MP3 compression, so figuring DV uses uncompressed, I decompressed them...same skipping.

Before I hooked up my DV cam I opened the program and it sent out signals to my TV through my DVC II. That would be great if it worked, but it was a rolling black screen. As if I was sending out a PAL signal. Another no-go.

It also sends out JPGs, that works fine on my system .;)

[DDogg]

I noticed it pushed my old AMD 1.4 TBird to about 95% cpu usage so anything less would probably not work. I don't actually use it to view movies in realtime. I just use it to pre-check for color and clarity from avs scripts and stuff.

[BlueCup]

Can you DV-In from your comp and send out to your TV using RCAs at the same time? Maybe I have to take the tape out to do so. When I tried to do it with the tape in, it wouldn't work.

[Backwoods]

Is anyone still using this program or able to contact the author? His site seems to be down and I'm having an odd problem.

Hooking up my D8 cam or miniDV VX2000 a dialog box would pop up asking what I would like to do. I.E. capturing video, play video, etc. Now that box is blank with nothing in it and whenever I try to export an AVI through firewire with either camera and Video2DV it crashes.

Any ideas?

[mustardman]

I have used Video2DV on an Athalon 1.3GHz. It can just barely cope doing DivX with MP3 sound, if I do anything on the PC, it starts to stutter (audio & video) and won't recover, I have to start it and let it run. It is real CPU intensive. (looking forward to a new PC for christmas!)

It will output DV without re-encoding if you ask it to (1st version only, the second version doesn't have this feature), otherwise it will always decode (whatever) and re-encode to DV to output it to the IEEE.

A problem I had was with aspect ratios : For example, a anamorphic DivX encode (2.2:1) was restretched to fit 4:3. As you can gather, it looked pretty bad. I used FFDshow to resize the picture so it looked OK (by forcing black bars top and bottom), but unless I got the aspect ratio exactly right (really hard, and probably different for every encode), then the resulting image had weird artifacts.

I wrote to the author, asking if the program could include an option to keep the original aspect ratio, but never heard back. Perhaps others would like to write to him as well?

MM