Best Capturing Card?

[crow8k3a]

Hey Guys,

i am going to be getting rid of my RRG and G400max In favor of the Parhelia soon.

I would love to have the rt2500 but i don't have that much cash. I'm into video editing, and i output final formats in vcd and svcd and a few other formats. I'm interested in the highest quality creation of mpeg1vcd svcd and mpeg2 .

I 'm looking for something 250$ or less to do this, i saw the wintv pvr by happauge, but i heard the quality of the mpegs created aren't that good and that to create vcds and svcds u have to recompress the mpegs after u capture them.

What would u guys suggest i look into?
Thanks

Oh, it must be windowsxp compatible

[Reggie]

https://www.terratec.com

Terratec Cinergy 400 will do the job, price 60-70 US$

Best way to create mpeg-2 is to capture with YUV2 - > HUFFYUV,
edith the huffyuv (free) and then export to mpeg-2 using either
tmpgenc (free) or ligos (www.ligos.com).


Compression directly to mpeg-2 is possible, however you will
need a P4 3GHz in order to capture with maximum motion vectors
and best quality. My suggestions is to capture by using huffyuv and then convert to mpeg or using picvideo.

Regarding the Hauppauge I have seen a lot of criticism, not
related to the quality but problems related to capture full screen
and mixed field order problem. search www.deja.com (Google Groups) for info. However, Hauppauge is one of the most used capture cards out there. Hence there is always a solution.

Personally I like the Terratec. Just connect camcorder and press record on the remote control. Read my post about terratec.
Unfortunately I have only used the terratec card a week, so there
might be unknown problems.


Regards Reggie

[crow8k3a]

thanks

thanks for your reply, it looks like a good low priced catpure card.

does it support on the fly mpeg 1 capture? and mpeg 2 ?

what resolutions can you capture? like what is the highest?

i have a 1.33ghz computer. I would prolly be encoding externally with tempeng to vcd and svcd.

Also, i cannot find anywhere in the america's to buy this product? where about can i buy this ?

thanks alot for your time

[crow8k3a]

thanks

thanks for your reply, it looks like a good low priced catpure card.

does it support on the fly mpeg 1 capture? and mpeg 2 ?

what resolutions can you capture? like what is the highest?

i have a 1.33ghz computer. I would prolly be encoding externally with tempeng to vcd and svcd.

Also, i cannot find anywhere in the america's to buy this product? where about can i buy this ?

thanks alot for your time

[Reggie]

Personally I would stay away from svcd,
Fist Svcd is only supported by 1 out of every 20 dvd players
Second, the bitrate is far to low for interlaced materiale, hence
most svcd looks even worse than vhs. Ofcourse you can Deinterlace but Deinterlaced movies looks like crap on tv. Especially if the source comes from a handheld camcorder.
However I have seen progressive taped movied (Hoolywood
) which looks good on svhs.
Third DVD-r /+r prices are dropping, soon a dvd recorder will cost
the same as cd-r recorders.

Best ways (I think) for editing and archiving analouge videoes are:
1) capture full screen via huffyuv interlaced if the materiale is
interlaced
2) export to mpeg-2 with high bitrate 7000-8000 interlaced if the materiale is interlaced. (remember correct field order)
3) export the same materiale above to vcd by resizing and deinterlacing.
4) Burn one dvd and one vcd :-)

If the dvd looks bad on computer due to interlaced jaggies, play it back to tv. Personally I use realmagic mpeg-2 decoder which
deinterlace my movies on the fly when played back on computer.


Both vcd and mpeg-2 are industrie standards.

If you want to capture movies on the fly i.e broadcast, divx 5.0 impresses me.

And yes to previous question, its possible to capture on the fly mpeg-1 and 2 or any other codecs installed. I have not tested the mpeg-2 encoder included with terratec. My guess is Ligos gomotion. (dont know)

Anyway Terratec supports both svhs and svhs capture resolutions.






Regards

[crow8k3a]

where to buy

thanks alot for your help, i'm prolly gonna stick to vcd for my captures. I still can't find anywhere to buy this card, i'm gonna try a couple more places today.

Thanks again

[Brian Ellis]

Another alternative is the Canopus ADVC100 which converts analogue to DV. You can then use any old cheapo DV card. I chose this several weeks ago and certainly don't regret it.

From your spelling, I guess you are probably in N. America, where DV may be slightly poorer than in PALland, if you wish to use mattes. I can't judge what difference this would make. This is because the horizontal chroma compression in NTSC-DV is 4:1, whereas it is 2:1 in PAL-DV.

[crow8k3a]

well i'm into video editing alot so i know dv isn't quite as good w/ chroma keys and mattes. I just don't know much abou tthe yuv2 that he was talking about and how it compares to other codecs such as mjpeg and dv.

if anyone can shed some light on this that'd be great.
Yah i'm from the US

[Reggie]

Huffyuv is almost like zip files. i.e.. lossyless.
At least so they say.

http://math.berkeley.edu/~benrg/huffyuv.html

Problem with encoding mjpeg into mpegs is related to
the algorithm mjpeg is using (Jpg). Mjpeg converts everything into small blocks. Mpeg-1 and mpeg 2 are optimised for analog video, not digitized movies full of small blocks. Even if you cant see any blockyness in the mjpeg stream the mpeg encoder can and even worse, the encoder increases these artifacts. Hence, its much better to compress an uncompressed source.

e.g. if you compress text with jpeg you will see blockiness around the text. If you transcode this jpg into mpeg the blockyness or artifacts become even more obvious.

If you save text image as bmp there are no blocks. Further, if you compress the image with zip there are still no blocks or artifacts. Roughly, that is the difference between huff and mjpeg.

Best thing to do is to do the following with both matrox and terratec included Hauppauge

Use internal compressor YUV2, install and select HUFFYUV as output . There is an YUV2 patch available for matrox G , which enables YUV2 via avi_io, virtualdub or mediastudio.

Think the hole thing functions as follow if you install huff and have a card which is yuv enabled:

Signal from camera -> Capure Card create many samples on the croma and luma signal-> these samples are compressed internal on capture card into YUV2 (20MB /sec- > YUV2 video source travles via PCI bus into the CPU which compresses the signal with HUFF down to 9M/sec and store this stream on disk.

NB this is far beyond my area of knowledge.

Hope this help.

[crow8k3a]

well i have the RRG from matrox, and i don't think the patch works with that only the marvel? Or does it? and if it does where can i get this patch?

Also i cannot find this terratec cinergy tv400 anywhere to buy in the us for the us version. Anyone know? Thanks

[dshumake]

You could find a reseller near you and ask them if they would import the card for you.

http://www.terratec.net/ttus/sales.htm

[crow8k3a]

well i just talked to terratec, they said there is no us version of the card, so it looks like i'll have to get something else. I can't get the import cause it is PAL and i need NTSC.


Does anyone know of a cheap good tv card that will capture yuv2? I need help.