Haig or Olliver --- Please read !

[coolfish]

Haig or Olliver, please read the "troubles still" thread. It'll tell you all that I've tried to do in order to get my RR-G to capture properly in desktop rez's higher than 800x600, and that I still continue to get garbage followed by black and white frames in captures in desktop rezes higher than 800x600.

My key concern is so that I can capture stuff properly, and then compress it properly to MPG in my natural desktop rez of 1280x1024 (having to switch to 800x600 sucks poo).

Also, everytime I load up PC-VCR, my Line In is muted -- but that's my sound source, so i have to unmute it manually. anyway to set PC-VCR so that it doesn't mute my line-in on startup of PC-VCR?

thanks.

coolfish.


[This message has been edited by coolfish (edited 13 February 2000).]

[RBryant]

Coolfish, if mpg is your ultimate goal then just bypass the whole RRICM* and use the YUY2 hack and Ulead VS4 to capture straight to mpg... you'll end up with much better results... not mention saving hours of mpg rendering time. All you need is about 450-500Mhz proc...

Also, you shoudn't use 1280x1024 as it is not 4:3, use 1152x864 or 1280x960... your captures will looked stretched out to the sides if you use a 5:4 aspect ratio. Is it really that big of deal to switch to 800x600x16 to capture and back to 1280x1024x32 to edit? Hotkeys make it much easier. Besides, you don't have to see anything but the video window to capture, so 800x600 is plenty. Just trying to help...
Good luck!


Garrett

[coolfish]

Yuy2 hack? Ulead VS 4 (I have Ulead MS Pro 5 VE) ? I have dual celery 500's (waiting for that win2k support! :> ) so.. All i'm doing is recording tv shows that I want to keep. I need a way to get rid of commercials and whatnot.

regarding switching into 800x600 - the pain is there if i want to work on something while capturing, or if i accidentatly forget to switch, my capture is no good..

as for aspect ratios, I capture in 704x480 - does it matter what size I have the capture window at?

[RBryant]

Hey coolfish! I do exactly what you are trying to do! I capture an hour long show, cut out the commercials and make a VCD out of it that I can play later on my dvd player... all with my RR-G and G400Max...

You can capture DIRECTLY to vcd compliant mpeg1 without losing a single frame, edit out the commercials, smart render back to a file, lay it out as a vcd and burn it and the whole thing takes less than a couple of hours!

The YUY2 hack allows you to capture in raw YUY2 instead of raw RGB or compressed MJPEG... Ulead Video Studio 4 (or Ulead Media Studio Pro 6) can pipe that raw YUY2 directly to its MPEG plugin to create a VCD compliant MPEG-1 stream. Since YUY2 is the native format for MPEG, the conversion is done much more quickly, ensuring 0 frame loss. The end result is an hour long VCD, which you can easily chop the commercials out of with VS4 or MSP6 and then smart render back to another MPEG ( you can smart render since you aren't doing anything but cutting and splicing as smart rendering is essentially just copy and paste and therefore much faster than actual MPEG rendering ). Then use Adaptec EZCD Creator Deluxe to take that VCD compliant MPEG and it will do the rest of the work!

You don't really have to even use the Matrox MJPEG codec ( which is what is causing all of your problems ) and I capture with my desktop set to 1920x1440.... so you should be ok there too....

Good Luck!

Garrett

[coolfish]

That sounds awsome! So I just haveta pick up a copy of one of those programs and then hack it somehow ( which way do you do it? registery or did you crack the files?) and then i'm set!?

wohohoo! Gots ta gets me dat quick den!

Coolfish

[RBryant]

The YUY2 hack is actually just for Matrox's Video For Windows Driver and is independent of any capture programs such as VS4 or MSP6. Just change some registry settings for the VidCap driver. You still need to get a hold of VS4 or MSP6... I would definitely recommend MSP6 if you can afford it. It does everything you need all in one program...

Here's the .reg file I use to switch back to VCD mode:

352x240YUY2.reg
--------------------------------------------
REGEDIT4

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Matrox\RainbowRunner\0 \VidCap\CurrentValues\DisplayWidth]
@="352"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Matrox\RainbowRunner\0 \VidCap\CurrentValues\DisplayHeight]
@="240"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Matrox\RainbowRunner\0 \VidCap\CurrentValues\ColorFormat]
@="YUY2"
---------------------------------------------

Good Luck!

g

[DrMordrid]

Don't you guys just love how Matrox & Uleads stuff work together?

Also I'll second, third and fourth the MSPro 6.0 suggestion. Awesome program and GoMotion MPEG-1/2 on top of it all.

Jeeezzzz....

Dr. Mordrid

[RBryant]

You said it all Doc!

g

[RBryant]

Yes Michka, actually I was talking about the LSX-MPEG encoder that MSP6 uses to export an EDL as a VCD compliant MPEG-1. I usually capture raw RGB, do all my editing on that raw AVI, and then export it as an NTSC VCD MPG. The resulting quality is simply amazing compared to capturing straight to MPG with Go-Motion and then recompressing the EDL with LSX...

The funny thing is that when I render the raw RGB EDL to MPG with LSX, it goes about just over 15% of realtime... so I wonder if my processor was another 15-20% faster could I capture directly with the LSX encoder? That would be awesome.... because I can barely even tell the difference between the raw AVI and LSX MPG on my monitor, and I can't tell at all on the TV!!! Even when there is lots of motion (because most of my captures are of kung fu movies)

Take care!

g

[Michel Carleer]

RBryant,
15 to 20% more than real time? Is this due to your PC, or is the LSX-MPEG plug-in that fast? Because when recompressing in MPEG1 with the LSX-MPEG stand-alone program (not the plug-in), it takes about twice the duration of the movie on my PIII 600MHz.
I usually capture in YUY2 (modified vcap16.dll) with MPEG4 compression on the fly. The advantage of this is the high compression ratio of the MPEG4 stream without losing a lot on the picture quality. The resulting quality is about the same as with the Matrox MJPEG compressor, but 1 hour of video only fills ~500 Mb. The high compression ratio enables me to avoid the 2 Gb file size limit, even when digitizing a complete motion picture.
Now, there is a catch here: I can compress in MPEG4 format because the Microsoft MPEG4 codec installed on my PC comes from an old (April 99) version of the Windows Media Tools. The newer version (the one you can download today)only works with the WMT streamer itself whereas the old version works with any VfW compliant capture program. I am using MSP5 to do the capture.
Michka

[RBryant]

A 4:22 clip in raw RGB24 AVI took 4:46 to encode to NTSC VCD on my single Xeon 500Mhz 512k processor. (262 seconds in 286 seconds = 9% extra so I was a little off earlier)

The <NEW> LSX MPEG encoder that comes with MSP6 is lightyears ahead of the older one. The quality is still really up there, as I noted in an above post.

Believe me, I know exactly what you are talking about... I used to capture an hour long show in highest quality 704x480 MJPEG which took about 7(?) gigs, edit out the commercials in MSP5VE and export as a 352x240 MPEG1 for VCD and it would take about 12 hours to render using MSP5VE's MPG encoder...

any idea how I can get a hold of the older MPEG4 codec?

[RBryant]

Nevermind! I found it!!!! Wow!!!!!

One minute of MPEG4V3 is 17MB though, as opposed to 10MB for VCD MPG1...

Couple of other questions Michka...

What is the difference between V1,V2, & V3? I know it's motion, but I don't know which one is low motion, middle, and high motion...

In the configure box, how does quality relate to bitrate? Does the smoothness and crispness refer to motion blur?

Thanks!

g

[Michel Carleer]

From what I have read, V1 is for slowly moving pictures (giving best picture quality for almost still pictures) and V3 is for movies with rapid movement and a lot of transitions (better transitions, but slightly degraded quality for still pictures). V2 is somewhere in the middle. Should I add that even with the more recent version of the MPEG4 codec, it is still possible to do MPEG4 compression from any capture program, but only with V1. As for your other questions about the quality settings (crispness, bit rate,...) I must admit my ignorance. I usually leave the default settings. I must add that I usually capture in 352x288 res (yeah, Europe, PAL). As far as I understand, crispness has nothing to do with motion compensation, merely some kind of low pass filter. I should really have a closer look at the WMT help file. Commonly said: Read the F***ing Manual.
As for the Ligos LSX-MPEG program, I am still using the ver. 2.0 Matrox edition. Maybe ver. 3.0 has a better throughput.
Michka

[Michel Carleer]

Doc,
I disagree, GoMotion is far from perfect. PCs today are still not fast enough to properly compress to MPEG1/2 in software in real time. As long as you compress a movie showing no moving objects, no panning and no abrupt transitions between successive scenes (like a speaker in front of a static background), then the GoMotion works OK. As soon as some movement takes place, the interframe (time) compressor can't cope and very strong artifacts are generated. Try once to compress the same shot (with reasonably fast moving objects) with GoMotion and then with LSX-MPEG. The difference in picture quality is really astounding. Both compressor are from Ligos, but the former tries to compress in real time, whilst the other takes it's time to calculate the prediction vectors.
Michka.