What Programs For Recording?

[TMBackstrom]

Just picked up a WinTV card, and am running WinXP. I was wondering what're the best programs to use for recording from analog source and converting to VideoCD format?

[DrP]

There are two programs to use. AVI_IO and iuVCR. AVI_IO only supports VFW so capturing on a WDM card goes through the broken MS vfw>wdm driver and is limited to one field captures. There is a ver of AVI_IO that supports WDM in the works.

iuVCR suports WDM directly. AVI_IO has the nice feature of always keeping audio and video synced. It does this by dropping or inserting a frame of video to compensate for drift. This can give 1 drop in 30,000 or so depending on your audio card. If you capture via a card that has the audio and video clock derived from the same oscillator they should never drift out and hence zipp frame drops.

If you are a frame drop freak and can't handle any drops, and capture via unlocked audio and video sources, iuVCR is the better approach as you can set it to have the video stream as the master time source. It then recalcs the audio rate at the end of the capture to suit which gives odd results like 47990Hz etc. I simply resample the audio to 48000 using virtualdub when I use iuVCR. iuVCR 4.0 beta2 seems to have a problem where it ignores dropped frames when calcing the audio rate so it never syncs properly ... or alteast that's what's happening for me!

The 3rd of the two programs to use is virtualdub. Its also a VFW capture program and can do audio syncs the same as iuVCR.

For all of them I would capture using huffyuv for best quality.
Convert to a VCD formatted mpeg1 using TMPGEnc.
I capture with AVI_IO, edit with virtualdub then frameserv into TMPGenc using TOOLAME to encode the audio.

http://www.iulab.com

http://www.virtualdub.org

http://www.nct.ch/multimedia/avi_io/

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

http://www.tmpgenc.net

http://www.flexion.org/audio/toolame/