Some questions - hints?

[shevegen]

Heya,
I am capturing (correct word?) via a Sony Vaio and Giga Pocket, the recorded stream is Mpeg2 PAL. My problem is that for some channels, there seems to be a lot of noise.
One example: I have a scene with a lot of black/dark areas. They arent really black though, they have some kind of strange grains - maybe the real background wasnt truly black, but a mix of very dark brown + black.

Now, when I use mencoder to convert the stream into xvid avi, i deinterlace, and use a delogo filter - but of course i re-encode the bad pixels too.

Is there some way to:

- Use another "capture device"?
- Is there any way to use a dumb filter to have the first picture "smoothened", so that the grains appear less strong?


I dont really need something that kills the grains off by blurring a lot, just a bit. I dont expect very good results anyway, so far there seemed to be a big difference - local TV signals seem to record much better than those that come via cable to the Sony Vaio.
Any help appreciated, even if its one meaning no real changes can be done easily, because this at least would help me to focus on other things of interest, like playing more with mencoder... ;)

[jggimi]

We have little help for you, as Sony VAIO laptops use a proprietary capture technology.

...for some channels, there seems to be a lot of noise.

This sounds like an RFI problem. I assume by your description, you are using a channel tuner inside the laptop. If so, sources of RF interference can be from anything inside the laptop, or any equipment the antenna cable (usually coax) passes by.

If you're doing channel selection on the laptop from an RF signal going to the laptop ... as you describe ... you might try using an external tuner (VCR, Cable set-top-box, etc.) and connecting composite video or S-video rather than RF to your laptop.

If, instead, you are already using composite or S-video input, then look to your external tuning device and its RF input.