Various (mainly) VHS capture questions.

[The Therion]

Hi all,

(newbie alert ! :D )

I need to transfer several VHS tapes to CDs (Divx).So far I've been doing this using the following :

Duron 700@933Mhz
392MB PC133 RAM
Windows 98SE
Asus TNT svga (Asus 2.0 capture driver)
Divx 5.02
VirtualDub

The system is a bit old (for video compression anyway) so i will probably be upgrading in a couple of months.My questions are :

1)What would be the best (value/money) solution for my new svga card ? ATI or nVidia with video in ? I WILL be buying a new svga so i dont think i can spend more for a dedicated capture card.And those tv-tuner/capture cards i see out there dont seem to have decent quality (actually ,from what others tell me, the cheap ones are a lot worse than the one i have now ! ) Besides i'm fairly content with the quality of the present card... (plus there's not much quality to get from vhs anyway,right? )

2)Is it wise to change the source capture video settings (brightness,contrast,etc) to the desired before capturing Or , capture at defaults and then not tamper with them,but only adjust them on the playback ?

3)What causes frame droping apart from cpu ? Mine seems to be at 15-30% and i drop 5-10 frames out of a good quality VHS 25 fr/sec capture.I have noticed that having the partition defragmented doesnt do much for me,as it is a dedicated for capture partition so it always contains a few big files.

4)The 2 most important sources i will be doing capturing from are : VHS and videocamera DV .Based on this, is there enough quality gain from using a dedicated capture card instead of a video-in svga, to justify its purchase ?

Uhmm.....thats it for now...i have some compression questions but i better go post them on the other forum
:cool:

thanks for reading

[vmesquita]

1) I really don't like this video cards that also capture. I think it's better to have a video card and a capture card, sice sooner or latter you may want to upgrade, and you can always choose to upgrade only one of them (and not be forced to change both becaus they are all-in-one). I have a bt878-based card and I am very happy with it. Before I had an All-in-Wonder Pro. Maybe the other member can help you out more with this.
2) It's better to adjust this settings during capture. During playback you may not be able to do this correctly, specially if you need to do great brightness or contrast adjusts.
3) What resolution are you capturing? What codec are you using (to capture, not to store, or are they the same)? Do the problem also happens when capturing TV broadcast?
4) Sorry can't help with this one... What is your card capture chipset?

[]'
vmesquita

[The Therion]

1)What model was your ATI all-in-woder card ,what model/brand is your current capture card,and how much difference did you notice between the 2 ?

3)I'm capturing with the Asus 2.0 capture driver (PAL) which allows me 704x576 and this is what i almost always use.This driver ,at this resolution (which is the max) and at 25 frames/second , captures 40 minutes into 4GBytes of space (aproximately).Out of a 40 minute capture i get 5-15 frames dropped,which is not bad as all the frames are about 60.000.But still i was wandering... (i dont capture from tv,dont have one in my room).

4)Actually the question is hypothetical.About the future.What card i should get.Whether for the sources i want to capture from, there is significant gain in quality,to choose a dedicated card (still a cheap one though) over a svgs with video-in card.

thanks for the help :)

[vmesquita]

1) I had a ATI All in Wonder Pro 4Mb. Basically I hated to depend on official drivers. They took like forever to be updated and nothing could be done. Now I have a GeForce MX200 with a PixelView PlayTV Capture Card (bt878 based). Loosing frames is bad, but it seems to me that its very hard to capture VHS and not some loose frames, because of some synch issues. I generally loose 2~5 frames)

3) I don't think you can get better quality with a new card, unless you buy some really expensive card for professionals, but I don't think that would be your idea.


4) I am very happy with my setup. But if you wanna buy a new card look for those with a 10 Digital converter (mine has 8) , they should give you more quality on colors. There are some around and they are no too expensive, The drawback is that you can't use open source drivers (but that wouldn't be necessary if the enclosed drivers were good). I just think that separating both things makes upgrades easier.

[Ookami]

Originally posted by vmesquita
But if you wanna buy a new card look for those with a 10 Digital converter (mine has 8) , they should give you more quality on colors. There are some around and they are no too expensive, The drawback is that you can't use open source drivers (but that wouldn't be necessary if the enclosed drivers were good). I just think that separating both things makes upgrades easier. [/B]

Quote from Eduardo (see http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?threadid=182360 ):

The CX881 has a 10bit ADC converter, but won't let you capture in 10bit mode, as no video display card is able to display such 10bit images... In fact, the only way to fully exploit those bits is to connect an external MEPG2 hardware encoder chip to the CX881. So, using any WDM / VFW capture program/codec you will only get 8bit (as the older bt8x8). The CX881 will deliver an improved image (compared to the older Bt8x8) because the digital video processing stages of the CX881 were improved...

[vmesquita]

Thanks, Ookami!

Now I feel even happier with my BT878 card and I think I can fully recommend it to The Therion... CX881 may have slighty better image, but certainly it can't beat BT878 community support (DScaler, BTWincap, and so on).

[]'s
vmesquita

[The Therion]

Ok,then at this point could you reccoment some BT878 cards so i can do a research , see how much they cost etc ?

Thanks again ! :)

[Ookami]

>CX881 may have slighty better image,

Well, as far as I have heard the image is not only slightly better. Not to mention that just because the card/GPU etc. has the same ADC doesn't mean the quality will be the same. Implementation is the keyword that is very often forgotten...

Before the drivers written by a user the BT chip implementations were almost always showed as "This is how you not do it!"...

>Actually the question is hypothetical.About the future.What card i should get.Whether for the sources i want to capture from, there is significant gain in quality,to choose a dedicated card (still a cheap one though) over a svgs with video-in card.


Well, I think you should answer your question by yourself. Make a forum search you'll find many different opinions, not to mention that the very same change as there arises new hardware/drivers/software/filters etc. etc. .

You should mention your budget, what is your main goal, what do you do with the video (filtering etc.?)...

Cheers,

Mijo.

[The Therion]

You should mention your budget, what is your main goal, what do you do with the video (filtering etc.?)...

Ok part of this i already mentioned,but let me gather it up below :

purpose : VHS to CD (Divx mainly) , DV to CD (Divx) and later perhaps instead of using CDs i may be using DVDs (once the DVD-R prices fall).As for editing, i now use VirtualDub and crop/clean the image i get from the VHS.

budget : I would say no more than 150 $ I was going to spend max 350 for an AllInWonder ,so if i dont,and get a regular svga (around 200), i can use the rest of the money for the capture card.

[^^-+I4004+-^^]

so far CX chipset is known only for driver issue etc.
ie. if you can't get it to work at hires,how will you say if it's better or worse then anything...........

users that got it to work on hires usually were pleased and said it's better than bt8x8 (and it should be as bt8x8 is 5-6 years old chip)
by looking some screenshots and samples,the difference is not so big at all...

and then,bt8x8 has all the support that years of development in both mfr and user field made.......that's what makes bt8x8 stand out....
if datasheets are made available for CX chipset it migth see it's glory days too...if not,then user must rely on mfr alone to provide decent driver etc.

i would go for tested and reliable thing if i need the card now...and if i'm willing to wait i might want to study dscaler news, chip mfr drivers support,card mfr support ,associated forums etc.
(although there was much discussion about it here too...and probably will be much more)