Oh! No! HELP please! capturing on hauppauge wintv pci fm

[az]

Hi there

I want to capture video (from PAL DV, but don't have the money for a 1394 card), maintaining the best quality while still being able to fit ~15 mins on a CD. (and maybe how I should encode it to post it online, if anyone wants to see my daughter )

I have a Hauppauge WinTV PCI FM, Duron 750, 256 MB DDR, and an IBM 60GXP on Win98 (first edition).

How should I do it? My HD isn't fast enough to capture full res/24bpp, and my system isn't fast enough for encoding it on the fly. I have no problem with half the resolution, but I do want full 25 fps, vivid colour, and don't really like blocky artifacts. The material I want to capture is rather slow moving, few hard cuts.

I've tried NanoDVR MPEG 1, and the quality at 3Mbit was acceptable, but it either produces a really nasty watermark, crashes my computer, or stops recording for no apparent reason.

Now, are there any other apps for capturing, or should I capture uncompressed and then compress afterwards (with which codec, which app to use, etc).

Ah, and what colour format should I use? BTYUV? 24 bit? YUY2? (I want to be able to watch this Video on a System without hauppauge drivers, which rules BTYUV out, AFAIK)

Thanks for reading this far. Eagerly awaiting suggestions

az

[Indiana]

As format you should use YUY2. Have you tried using HuffYUV for capturing? This doesn't take as much CPU power for on-the-fly compression as mpeg, has the additional advantage of being a lossless compression algorith and still decreases the data-rate of a full-res capture to ~8MB/s (which can be maintained by most HDs).

You can then compress the captured file to a high-quality, but slow (like mpeg2 or DivX) codec afterwards and end up with the best possible quality at a reasonable file-size.

[az]

Thank you very much, Indiana

But I have even more questions *g

What is HuffYUV? A codec? A capturing app?

Where do I get HuffYuv?

Can windows media player 6.4 play MPEG 2 without additional codecs?

If so, where to get an mpeg 2 compressor?

Thank you yet again

AZ

[Technoid]

"What is HuffYUV? A codec? A capturing app?"

It's a........ Codec!

"Where do I get HuffYuv?"

Here..........HuffYUV


"Can windows media player 6.4 play MPEG 2 without additional codecs?"

No, sorry... But you can stilll use MPeg1 wich it does support with good quality iff the clipp is only 15 min!

"If so, where to get an mpeg 2 compressor?"

Tmpeg encodes both Mped1 and 2!!!

"Thank you yet again

AZ "

Your Welcome!

[az]

Thank you yet again

I'll try it tomorrow, when I'm not so tired anymore

AZ

[AndrewDV]

Hi,

The advice above is very sound.

Just to give you another option, try out the PIC MJPEG codec. It is not a lossless codec, like Huffyuv. However, it gives excellent quality at good compression. It can also be used for video playback as well (Huffyuv is not optimized for playback). You can find it here:

http://www.jpg.com/video/mjpeg.htm

[Indiana]

Yes, the PicVideo MJPEG is a very nice codec, especially if you want to do longer captures at still full-res and high-quality. And it's very fast, too (seems to consume less CPU power than HuffYUV, here).

[Dr Mordrid]

To be comparable PICVideo should be set for a quality of 20. It's also capable of playing back it's captures, which HuffYUV is not intended to do.

HuffYUV is intended for captures, high quality compositing of effects and THEN to be rendered into something else (MPEG-2 for VCD/SVCD/DVD etc).

Dr. Mordrid