Newbie to VHS capture - what card type do you advise?

[BluDChyLD]

Hey,
I have decided to invest in a capture card to archive some old VHS - I am torn between buying a cheaper .AVI capture card and using a loseless codec, or spending a little extra on a MPEG-2 hardware capture card... I whichever way I choose I will be filtering and re-encoding the capture into XviD format for storage on CD.

I have read a few guides and it seems an mpeg2 card is a more practical solution as far as HDD space and CPU usage is concerned, but will I loose quality using this method (when compared to loseless compression>XviD)?
Thanks for any help!
daws0n

[cwk]

Howdy BluDChyLD,

Yup, an Mpeg-2 card will save you space, but at the expense of quality. I have both types of cards and use the AVI capture card exclusively. When using the Mpeg-2 card In high-motion sequences in particular, the chroma gets very blocky.

I have an Adaptec Mpeg-2 card and a Leadtek WinFast avi card. I notice that the Mpeg-2 card does appear to yield a sharper picture, but the sharpener available now--like LimitedSharpen--can do the same thing without ampiflying the noise as much.

As far as space goes, there are some codecs--like mjpeg--that compress ALMOST losslessly, while saving significant space over Huffyuv. But you does lose quality there as well. A search on the forums would yield some good information there.

ck

[mic]

FWIW, should be able to easily forgo hardware compression to mpg2, or just capture mp4 for that matter -- you have more then enough cpu for mpg2, which will probably task at 15% or lower. Otherwise it's all about opinions, but that's of course, My Opinion. :D

High bitrate mpg2 is cool, avi capture has always worked well, and going to one of the mp4 varieties sometimes gives more quality then converting later -- depends on source. With vhs capture + optional filtering + re-encoding might look worse from all the conversion loss then going straight to, in your case xvid.