Direct MPEG capture with Marvel G200?

[Marijn]

Hi all,

I have been playing with some software to get my Marvel to capture directly into MPG. I have used both PowerVCRII and Ulead Videostudio 4. I am able to capture, but results have given me a lot of dropped frames. I have a celeron 333 and 128Mb. Have some of you any experience on this and if so can you tell me what kind of setup you are using and what the max specs are that you can capture with?

Thanx.

P.S. I used RGB-16 capture with MS MPG4 compressor.

[Sciascia]

In order to capture straight to MPEG4, you will have to use yuv compression. To enable this you will need PD1.52 or earlier, and the yuy enabler on the download link of this site. You will also have to use a different capture program than PC-VCR, I believe that VS4 will work, if you can select the different compressor already. With your processor speed and RAM you will probably have to set it to CIF (352*240) for size. This is under the Format>Video Size option. (Be sure that you do not accidentally hit any of the buttons on the first screen, none of them should be selected). RGB's data rate is too high for your processor/disc to encode, using yuv or yuy it skips the step of re-encoding to RGB and the codec can compress it much better. The quality is also very good. I doubt that you will be able to capture full res, since I have a RAID0 array, 450MHz proc, 256M Ram and can only do CIF. This still looks great and it is very small file sizes. If you plan to edit with it, try to insert keyframes as often as possible in the compressor config. This will help in scrubbing and skipping frames. It won't add too much to the size of your file either. there are a lot of posts concernig this subject, try searching through the archives. A lot ot good stuff.

Good Luck

[Sciascia]

Glad I could help!! If you have any other problems, such as A/V sync try Markus Zingg's avi io application, it works very well with the marvel cards.

[Marijn]

Hi Sciascia,

thanks for your advice. I've tried what you described and everything works perfectly. I read some about the YUY2 patch before, but since everyone was talking about huge capture rates (20-30Mb/s), I never even thought in this direction.

Marijn