Best way to capture TV shows for later?

[coolfish]

Simple question - what's the best way to capture TV shows for later storage, preferably without commercials. Currently I capture in MJPEG (medium quality is fine), and edit out the commercials with the Ulead software bundled with the RRG. Then, I leave my computer on for the rest of the night to compress the show (20 minutes or so takes 3 hours) with Panasonic MPG compressor. This method sucks, although I can very easily edit out commercials.

So, what programs do you use? Is the quality the same if I capture YUY2 and do MPG at the same time? (in other words, can I watch it later full screen and barely be able to tell it's not the real thing)?

As a side note, _will_ the matrox software eventually allow us to capture YUY2 with software MPG compression without having to hack anything?

Any and all answers appreciated. (BTW I know some posts cover some of these questions, but it makes more sense in one cohesive chunk, besides it's fun to talk about how you capture stuff! :> )

coolfish

[wkulecz]

coolfish,

I'm afraid that the best way to do what you want is to go to Best Buy and get an "on-sale" $80 VHS VCR. Record the show and use the fast forward control on the remote to skip the commercials when watching.

At the present time there is no practical way to get anywhere near equal the quality of VHS with MPEG. Only thing I've seen that does, is YUV captures to a SCSI RAID 0 array and then MPEG encode the result. Practical problems are dealing with the ~54GB/hour capture files while encoding the MPEG.

I've seen quality a bit below VHS SLP quality from on-the fly YUV to MPEG using an ATI All In Wonder 128 and the bundled Ligos "go motion" encoder. You need something like IfilmEdit to clip the comercials out of the resulting MPEG (~660MB/hr) and a PIII is about the minimum CPU. I don't recommend ATI if Win2K is in your future, as at present all they have is promises and a bunch of lame drivers on the win2K CD. The AIW-128 is about $180.

Unfortunatly, the compression of MJPEG or DV seems to really mess up the Ligos "go motion" encoding (or the Video Studeo 4 version is crippleware) as I've been only able to produce crap quality with it so far -- worse than the stand alone demos from Panasonic or Ligos on the same source (although these aren't any good either and are the basis of my speculation that the MJPEG or DV compression is the reason, as they do give good results with YUV captured inputs).

--wally.

[pederbc]

I get the best result in MPEG-1 by using AVI_IO and the PICVIDEO codec (capturing at 352x288, PAL) and then using Panasonic MPEG. This gives me VHS quality. I've made some VCD's from VHS tapes with this method with good result.

[wkulecz]

pederbc,

I'd like to see a clip of what you describe as VHS quality VCD. I'll believe it when I see it.

What is special about the PICVIDEO codec?

The Panasonic demo encoder has only produced crap for me from Marvel G200 MJPEG. If using PICVIDEO makes the difference, then perhaps the Marvel black borders on transcode is a more than cosmetic bug! I've speculated that the black bars on top and left edges of the dmb1 codec output might be messing up the MPEG encoding, but I've no way to at present to evaluate it further. OTOH, the poor result I got from a DV clip and Ligos GoMotion with Video Studio 4 suggests its the compression in MJPEG and DV might be causing the poor quality. Others may think the quality was good, but only if never seeing a real "VHS quality" MPEG1
VCD format clip.

I'd like to find a solution, as capturing once in MJPEG to make a tape and then again in YUV for MPEG clips is a real PITA.

--wally.

[RBryant]

Hey coolfish, I guess the capturing problems have subsided? That's good!

I get the best results buy using AVI_IO to capture YUY2 352x240x29.97 to MPEG4V3 at 6000 kbps at 100% crispness... this takes 20MB/min on disc and is even faster to edit with MSP6 than MJPEG. A 30 minute show w/o commercials can fit on a CD no problem... (22 mins = 440MB)... For hour long shows, you could use 4500 kbps MPEG4V3, or make a VCD if you would rather use MPEG1 and/or watch it on a DVD player...

If VCD is your goal, then MSP6 has an incredible new version of the Ligos Transcoder that can go from MPEG4 to MPEG1 VCD in realtime on my 500Mhz machine...

I can literally capture an hour long show that comes on at 8pm and have it burned on a VCD by 10pm... YUY2/MPEG4 and AVI_IO/MSP6 together make an awesome combo:

60 mins to capture (YUY2 to MPEG4V3) -> 1.2GB
10 mins to edit the MPEG4V3 in MSP6 -> 900MB
40 mins to render the edited MPEG4V3 to MPEG1 in MSP6 -> 450MB
10 mins to burn to VCD


I've been capturing/archiving various television shows since I got my RR-G in December 98 and the method above is not only the fastest, but it produces the nicest looking VCDs I have ever been able to produce...

The only way that I could even imagine making them better (and this is being REALLY PICKY) is to capture the YUY2 at 704x480 so that I could deinterlace the fields when rendering to MPEG1 so that the frames would have motion blur

I used to wait 8 hrs for MSP52 to render my 45 min MJPEG clip to MPEG1 on my old celeron 300A at 504...

Hope this helps!

Garrett