Problem: capturing with Pinnacle and VirtualVCR/VirtualDub

[kitanai]

Hi, I am new to capturing stuff and I am definitely stuck...

From a friend of mine I got a Pinnacle PCTV card (PAL). I installed the WinXP WDM drivers and VirtualVCR to switch channel ot tune to the videos inputs.

Now I tried to capture some material.
I started with VirtualVCR and get picture and sound.
- I followed the tutorial at doom9, but the programm NEVER saves my settings (yes, I pressed the disk button)
- besides, I managed to record some stuff (YUY2,25fps) and I came up with over 600MB for just 30secs!!!
Well, how am I supposed to capture 2hours - I have "just" 30 gigs to spare...

Second try: VirtualDubMod, latest version.
At first it was fine.
- I had a preview until I changed the capture settings to 704x576 and YUY2.
- I pressed ok and VirtualDub froze.
- From that moment on, it always crashes my whole system when I try to do file->capture Avi. The sound starts, the preview windows stays grey and the statusbar shows: "status 401: Microsoft WDM Driver" someting...

HELP!!! What am I supposed to do here? Big files (or is that normal size?), crashing progs - I am lost :(

[toysoldier]

1. download "morgan mjpg" compress codec,this is hoem site:
http://www.morgan-multimedia.com/

set quality=85~90, one min file size almost is 100~200M,
30G hdd is enough to capture 2hrs.

2. if virtualdubmod not work,you can use virtualvcr,iuvcr,...etc.
I feel now my used file "iuvcr" is very good,you can try it.

[kitanai]

Thanky you very much!!!

That "morgan mjpg" compress codec seems to work great.
"iuvcr" is a little odd to use at first sight, so I decided to get back to VirtualVCR. Since I have very few tapes to copy, loosing setting on every start up should not hurt tooooo much :)
Are there some special settings for the codec, especially when recording PAL or NTSC?

One more issue:
I am kind of lazy, so I tried to encode the captured AVI using Goridan Knot. It provides correct aspect ratios, bitrates and nice deinterlace filters.
However, when previewing the settings in Goridan Knot (only AFTER applying fiters, ect, that is after pressing "save&encode") or in the final xvid I get the wrong colors.
For example: red is blue and blue is red. Colors seem to be inverted :confused:
This does not happen with VirtualDub standalone!

[toysoldier]

sorry,I dont know much about Goridan Knot language,
but I think it's using avisynth script,if so,
you can change it like this:

directshowsource("your_avi.avi") #just replace avisource("*.avi")