Best way to capture and convert (using the Marvel G400)

[Hacker]

Hi,
I'd have a question. I want to digitize a 3-hour VHS tape. Not now, because of lack of disk space, but one day. Till then I'd like to ask how would be the best way to do it.
I have experimented with HuffYUV lately and it's nice, the only problem is that my computer can only handle up to half the rate (that means up to 352*576). Now, if I capture like that, how am I supposed to encode it so it fits nicely fullscreen? Should I encode it first and then stretch (using resize in VirtualDub) or rather first resize and then encode?
Or is there any player out there capable of stretching it to fullscreen nicely?

TIA for all and any advice
Roman

(Crosslink to the Matrox forums thread - http://forum.matrox.com/mgaforum/For...ML/004047.html .)

[Dr Mordrid]

What's wrong with half D1 (352x576 PAL; 352x480 NTSC)? Cable/Satellite providers use it all the time with little in the way of quality loss. They just upsample it to 704 wide before its put out to your set.

Why few losses? Because 4:2:2 video only has one horizontal color sample for every two pixels. To half D1 you just drop half these samples and scale the luma (B&W portion) of the signal. When you scale up half D1 it just doubles up on the color samples and rescales the luma.

So.....capture half D1 and then encode that to a 704x480/576 MPEG. You won't loose much scaling it up at all and it'll play just fine through DVDMAX. I get very good results using VBR at 2600-3000 kbps.

What's that? Why not use 360x480/576 for half D1 since DVD, DV etc. use a 720 wide frame? Because 360 isn't evenly divisible by 16, the width of MPEG's macroblocks. 352 is. So are 704 and 720. As such 360 isn't MPEG compatable.

Now you get an idea why so many capture cards use 704 widths. Not only is it easier to produce half and quarter frame files which will be MPEG compatable, but the full frame size itself is also a supported standard for many uses.

Dr. Mordrid

[Hacker]

OK, thank you for your answer. Still, a few questions remain:
1. Resize first and then encode or encode first and then resize?
2. Or rather let it be at half-res and then stretch it to full-screen playerwise?

TIA
Roman