capturing with hauppauge pvr-150

[ezekiel_999]

Hello,

I'm new to the arena of tv capturing but I have been doing quite a bit of reading of various faqs and what not but I wanted to make sure I understood one thing first. What I read about capturing using huffy or mjpeg is that you can use those software captures or if your capture card has hard encoders you should use that instead. I was planning on capturing with winTV using 12/mbs rates with the hauppauge pvr-150 and then converting the captured tv episodes to smallers sizes/bitrates (divx or kdvd, not sure yet). Should I use the WinTv app to capture at 12/mbs or should I use powervcr or such with huffy/mjpeg. Which would give better results? I've been pretty disappointed with my winTV2000 captures thus far and have been thinking about returning the hauppauge pvr-150 card and possibly upgrading to a better card pvr-350? hoping that will improve the quality of the captured video??? Not sure which route will produce the cleanest images ... thanks.

[ReTox]

Capturing to Huffy is lossless so your capture will be just as good as your source. MJPEG is lossy but its slight at high bitrates. I use pegasus mjpeg and achieve 13:1 while maintaining excellent quality when I need to capture in this format (rarely now-a-days).

Most new capture cards capture to MPEG1/2. I find that it depends on the software how good your results are. Personally I use WinDVR3. It does wonderful caps and produces clean streams. PowerVCR has a slight problem in the NTSC framerate that causes sync issues when converting to avi (PAL does not have this problem). I've not used the WinTV app but I'm guessing the card has WDM drivers so any DirectShow based capture tool should work.

You mentioned you capture TV shows, in this case you do really have to choose. There was a time when MPEG2 was hard to cut/splice/merge but with tools like Mpg2Cut2 its easier. Capturing to Huffy or MJPEG allows easier cutting with virtualdubmod. Both require lots of space although MPEG2 is a lot less then Huffy.

I went through alot of the same things as you are. I capture world war 1/2 documentaries and have dealt with these questions. Maybe my setup and procedure can help you:

(1) Use WinDVR3 to capture to MPEG2 DVD quality modified to a smaller GOP (4,2) for easier and more precise cutting. The longer the time between key frames (Full frame info) the less likely you will be able to cut exactly where you want to, ie between commercials and the actual content you wish to keep. Note. Huffy/MJPEG keyframe every frame so thats why they are larger in size, but you can cut on any frame. I also make sure my source is S-Video since its better quality then most tv-tuner chips.

(2) Use Mpg2Cut2 to compile a clip list and save the full list as a final clip with no commercials. Its important to set the Output -> Parsing Options to parse all packets and deep parsing. This will clean up any bad joins and help ensure other programs can use the stream properly. Mpg2Cut2 leaves the GOP's open and some programs complain about it (DGIndex for example).

(3) So now you have a clean and complete DVD stream. You then need to decide what format you wish to convert to. This method allows you to continue to DVD/SVCD creation with most authoring softwares. You can also use GordianKnot to convert the stream to avi or similar container. I use x264 as its wicked good and a good step beyond MPEG-4.

(4) If your MPEG2 stream is larger then your burner capacity (mine is Single layer so I need to downsample from time to time) you can downsample several ways but I found that using DVD2SVCD (Look here for info on how (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=96732)) produces great results with the Roba method. You can also create an oversized DVD and use DVDShkink to tame its size. DVDShrink works really well for streams that are just over capacity, plus its WAY faster then a full recompress.

I guess it comes down to how you wish to watch your captures, if its just for your PC (video out like I do) then AVI may be preferable. If you wish to watch on a home theatre system then you will likely want to go the SVCD/DVD route (unless your player supports mpeg-4). I once had a hard time justifying the re-encoding of a stream (using DVD2SVCD or GordianKnot) but the truth is I get wicked quality that suits my needs perfectly.

I Hope that helps you out, let me know if you have any questions, I'll galdly answer them.

[Arachnotron]

Try playing with contrast and brightness. I forget which driver version I have (it was the latest stable from a month ago) and the default settings were wrong. The whole luma range was shifted upwards, with black ending up at 32 instead of 16. This makes the cap to bright and black looks grey.

Try to cap some stuff containing pure black and white and look at a histogram to check the black and white levels.