Video Quality To Expect With G450 with TV-Out Adapter Cable?

[dfragged]

Hi,

I have owned the G450 for a year, but just recently started to use the TV-Out adapter to record on VHS tape. I'm not happy with the quality of the image, and am wondering if I'm expecting too much from the card. My problem is that I don't know anyone else with the card to ask questions of. so.. HELP, PLEASE!!

Solid black screens look very noisy, and any text color besides white, has a bleed effect which is about 0.5 inch on a 19 inch screen.

I have recorded with both new composite and S-Video cords, with no real difference. I have recorded with S-VHS and VHS (different recorders) no real difference. I have tested the tapes on different TV's and the problem is the same. I have checked the output directly from the G450 with a monitor, and it's fine at that point. The power supply is filtered with an APC backup, I use new top grade tapes.

What kind of video quality can I expect with the TV-Out adapter cable?

Thanks in advance,

(pulling hair by the handful)

Marcus

[Dr Mordrid]

Are you using MPEG-2 or one of the *.avi software compressors? What bitrate? PAL or NTSC? What kind of source?


Generally speaking;

Current MPEG-2 realtime capture devices are OK for casual recording (TiVo type stuff) but lousy for editing. The MPEG profile (profile = standardized format) in consumer capture equipment is not one of those that can easily be used for editing because of its high compression ratio and the concatenation (throwing away) of much of the color signal to maximize compression.

There are MPEG profiles for editing, but they aren't in consumer (or even most prosumer) gear at this time. When you see the term "4:2:2P@ML" used in conjunction with an MPEG-2 capture/edit device then it's arrived

That's why on my eTV's I use AVI_IO as a capture program, which then permits captures using software codecs like the PICVideo MJPeg codec. This codec is INTENDED for editing and produces very good quality.

AVI_IO http://www.nct.ch/multimedia/avi_io/index.html

PICVideo http:www.jpg.com

Once edited these files can be output using the DualHead/DVDMAX feature of the eTV. Just make sure you check "use field based scaling" in the DVDMAX setups.

You can also compress PICVideo into very nice MPEG's using the TMPGEnc MPEG offline (non-realtime) encoder. It's not realtime, but then realtime encoding like the eTV capture does are never as good as offline encoding.

TMPGEnc http://www.tmpgenc.net

Dr. Mordrid