thegrimripper
2nd June 2005, 00:27
Hi folks
I have a mini-DV video camera and want to turn capture my vdeos both for playing (i.e. likely DVD) and archiving.
In the past I've done this capturing using firewire to AVI with VirtualDub and encoding with TmpgEnc. I've found that this has been a lot of work, and my mileage has varied. In particular, I've noticed that a fair number of my videos have the audio track just switch to white noise part way through, and some of my videos have bad motion artifacts. In the latter case I probably messed up the tmpgenc settings, but regardless - my conclusion is that this process has been a lot of work and the results have been unsatisfactory.
Subsequently I turned to capturing using my Hauppauge WinTV-PVR250 card. The downside is that I was converting from DV to analog video and then capturing back to digital, but it was real-time and the results were pretty good.
Still, I'm interested in trying to get better results (ideally eliminating the digital->analog->digital jump) without lots more work. So I've been looking at ways of capturing from DV to MPEG-2 that are (preferably) real-time, good qualiy, idiot-proof and are not going to cost me too much.
So far I haven't found the right solution. One possibility seems to be the Pinnacle AV/DV Studio, but I can't figure out if the PCI card actually has a hardware MPEG2 codec or if it is just a DV/IEEE1394 card that isn't going to buy me anything over my existing firewire port. Does anyone know, and has anyone got an opinion on whether this might produce better results that my current analog approach?
It seems there are cheaper hardware encoder chips becoming available (e.g. the one on the eVGA NVTV card) but not much yet in the way of cards using them other than by way of tuners.
I have a mini-DV video camera and want to turn capture my vdeos both for playing (i.e. likely DVD) and archiving.
In the past I've done this capturing using firewire to AVI with VirtualDub and encoding with TmpgEnc. I've found that this has been a lot of work, and my mileage has varied. In particular, I've noticed that a fair number of my videos have the audio track just switch to white noise part way through, and some of my videos have bad motion artifacts. In the latter case I probably messed up the tmpgenc settings, but regardless - my conclusion is that this process has been a lot of work and the results have been unsatisfactory.
Subsequently I turned to capturing using my Hauppauge WinTV-PVR250 card. The downside is that I was converting from DV to analog video and then capturing back to digital, but it was real-time and the results were pretty good.
Still, I'm interested in trying to get better results (ideally eliminating the digital->analog->digital jump) without lots more work. So I've been looking at ways of capturing from DV to MPEG-2 that are (preferably) real-time, good qualiy, idiot-proof and are not going to cost me too much.
So far I haven't found the right solution. One possibility seems to be the Pinnacle AV/DV Studio, but I can't figure out if the PCI card actually has a hardware MPEG2 codec or if it is just a DV/IEEE1394 card that isn't going to buy me anything over my existing firewire port. Does anyone know, and has anyone got an opinion on whether this might produce better results that my current analog approach?
It seems there are cheaper hardware encoder chips becoming available (e.g. the one on the eVGA NVTV card) but not much yet in the way of cards using them other than by way of tuners.