Help In Capture using Vdub with my Matrox Marvel G400

[foveauxkid]

Hi..I apologise if I am not in the right forum....I have a Matrox Marvel G400 in my Windows 98SE system......I want to
capture 3 x very rare music concerts (each aprox 1 hour long )that I have on PAL VHS .....I then intend to write to
disk and send over to the USA as part of a trade with a contact who does not have the ability to reformat Pal to NTSC on tapes.....Naturally I want to make the best quality job possible to fulfill my part of the deal even if I have to split each concert onto 2 or even 3 disks ...and let the guy in the States do what he has to ...He wants to re-record from the disks to NTSC Video Tape....

I am certainly no expert but I thought of using Virtual Dub capture ......as it has the multi segment capability ....I was wondering if there are any tips on settings etc that I should know about before trying to capture .....I have done some one minute experimental captures using Vdub Cap and have got 768x576 --dmb1 24bits per pixel 25fps with no dropped frames........I presume I get a whole concert captured on my hard drive at these settings and re-encode down for best quality....My contact in the USA would prefer disks to be written at MPEG-2 NTSC SVCD Standard, 480x480 and 29.97 ........
Am I on the right track here and can anybody just give me any tips .....I am familiar with Tmpgenc etc so I am not an absolute novice but I get confused with codecs etc???
I have been advised via Rec.video desktop to use "HuffyUV as the capture codec (might need the driver patch from matroxusers.com) " but could not find this patch ....

Anyway any tips will be gratefully received

....Thanks Ron NZ.

[Dr Mordrid]

I use AVI_IO for multi-segmented capture because it does something VirtualDUB doesn't: if there's a dropped frame it fills in the empty slot with the previous frame. This keeps the audio in synch over long captures with multiple drops. It can also span captures of up to 400g over multiple drives.

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

Granted it's not free costing $25 USD for the full version, but it's worth it in the long run.

HuffYUV is an excellent capture codec, but be aware that it takes up 3.5x as much space on the HDD as Matrox's MJPeg and is NOT for playback. It's optimized purely for high quality capture and editing.

HuffYUV's site has been taken offline as its author has evaporated from the video scene, but you can D/L it here;

http://www.divx-digest.com/software/huffyuv.html

Dr. Mordrid