tv shows to video (what format)

[hispanicboy]

ok, here is the deal, i have some cosby episodes that i have on vhs and i would like to get them on video. what format should i save them to? right now i am capturing on my pc (via premiere and dazzle) at full resolution 720x480 avi then i am running them through TMPGEnc and spitting out an 360x240 150-200MB mpeg.

is that the best thing to do?

would dixv work better and give me a smaller file size?

if so is there a quick avi to dvix converter?

what about if i wanna plop these onto a dvd in a few months?

could i fit 25 20 minute episodes on 1 dvd?

if so what resolution and format shoulod i be saving them in?

thanks in advance for all the help.

[2ZOD.COM]

Look around the forum and find the answers.

Every one of your questions has been answered already somewhere on here.

I'm not really sure what the best way to capture is, but it seems like you're going the right way for now. What people told me to do is encode with the m-jpeg codec first. This will give you pretty much the best quality you can get, and then convert it to whatever format you're going from there. If you want to make a VCD, you want to re-encode it in MPEG-1, and if you want DVD use MPEG-2. For the best quality you want to keep the resolution at 720x480. That's the standard dvd resolution.

Divx would give you smaller files, but you won't be able to play them in a stand alone dvd player. (I'm pretty sure on this, but not 100%)

Sorry I couldn't answer all your questions, but just look around the forum. They're all here.

[jggimi]

Welcome to the forum! I hope you find it useful....what format should i save them to? That depends entirely on how you plan to view them. From PC on monitor? PC -> TV-out? Standalone DVD player?...is that the best thing to do? Rule 12 (http://forum.doom9.org/forum-rules.htm) requests that you never ask what's best. But I can say, that if you're encoding captures into MPEG-1, probably there are solutions that will produce content with better perceived quality for you....would dixv work better and give me a smaller file size?It might work better, as you would have more flexibility on audio compression (such as MP3) and, while you would have flexibility for resolution and bitrate (as you do with MPEG), DivX can produce low-bitrate video that subjectively may appear to have higher quality than MPEG1/2 at equivalent bitrates. However, except for a very few new standalone DVD players, such as the new KiSS player, DivX is a computer-based video format only....if so is there a quick avi to dvix converter?You misunderstand. AVI is a container format for many different types of audio and video, including the DivX video codec. So you would first capture with an appropriate capture codec, such as Huffyuv (.avi), and appropriate audio format, such as Linear PCM (.wav), and then transcode the audio and video into, for example, DivX video codec and MP3 audio codec (.avi). The most popular DivX encoding suite used by members here is Gordian Knot, though there are others....could i fit 25 20 minute episodes on 1 dvd?It depends on the compressibility of each scene.

But do the math: 4,700,000,000 bytes on a 4.3GB DVD-R (approximate, I know, and this won't cover filesystem overhead) = 37,600,000,000 bits.
At 1000 kbps per second, the "raw" capacity is 37,600 seconds, or 10 hours. 25x20 minutes = 8 hours. This doesn't acount for audio, either.

However, you may not like the results at 1000 kbps. Perceived quality will depend on many things, such as resolution, use of bi-directional frames, bitrate, motion, and other factors....if so what resolution and format shoulod i be saving them in? ...I think I've already answered that...but the short answer is "it depends."

Start with the guides at www.doom9.org and you won't go wrong.

2zod was faster than I was...but he's right. Rule 1 is the key to obtaining the right solution.