Need help capturing quality video with G450 eTV

[dbk723]

Hi, I have a system (details below) with a G450 eTV card, and I'm trying to capture video using the PC-VCR program. I'm using the most recent version (2.10), but whenever I capture video or live TV in the MPEG2 mode I get a lot of (50-60) dropped frames at the beginning. I thought it was my antivirus program at first, but I get the problem even when I have it disabled. In addition to this, the MPEG2 file's audio and video are out of sync.

Has anyone else experienced this and found a workaround for it? I get good results capturing in YUV mode with VirtualDub, but the file sizes are enormous. Is there any solution that would allow me to get good video quality with a reasonable filesize using the G450?

Also, is there any way to adjust the audio capture properties in PCVCR?

Asus A7M266 board
1400 Mhz Athlon T-Bird
512 MB Crucial registered PC2100 DDR RAM
Western Digital 80 mb 7200 RPM HD
Sound Blaster Live! 5.1
G450 eTV
etc.

[Baerchen]

I can't tell you about the probs you experience (and I'd recommend visiting the Matrox support forums), however I'd have some proposals reducing the filesize when capturing with VDub.

You have the choice between lossy and lossless compression:

a) Lossless: the only good one known to me is HUFFYUV. Its compression factor is about 2 for resolutions of e.g. 352 x 288. Performance is excellent and with your CPU, there should be no problems. I chose this one so I have best control about further processing (which means _I_ can screw the quality, not the codec ;-).

b) Lossy: Try an MJPEG codec (by PicVideo e.g.). It reduces the filesize dramatically depending on the compression settings. However, low compression still gives very good results in regard to filesize.

In order to capture with one of these codecs, you _have_ to use a capture program other than PC-VCR, e.g. Virtual Dub or AVI_IO.

Maybe that helps a bit.