Any good free video capture software?

[Helevitia]

Originally posted by mits
Helevitia,
before you reformat, have you correctly uninstalled the old drivers and installed the new ones?
i.e.
1. Uninstall ati control panel
2. Uninstall ati display driver and reboot
3. Press cancel when "new hardware was found"
4. Given that you have downloaded and unpacked the latest ati display driver (~26MB the one with ati's control panel and not with catalyst control centre) run setup.exe. This will install ati's display driver, ati's control panel and ati's multimedia driver (ie wdm driver).
Normally installation should go fine, and if you check in device manager-> sound video and game controllers you should have 2 entries for ati multimedia like a. ATI rage theater WDM driver and b. ATI WDM MVD codec (i'm at work now and don't remember the exact names of these entries)
Connect your video signal from vcr to bob and your audio to the line-in of your soundcard and make sure that recording from line-in is enabled. Now check that overlay is ok, ie run whatever capture program you want (eg virtualvcr) and check that you see the input video on your monitor.
Run the capture program (eg virtualvcr), select the codec you want (eg Huffyuv or Picvideo) and make sure that you have selected to capture audio as well. Press the rec button and good luck.

Thanks for the help. Unfortunately I had tried all of this several times.

The good news is, I reformatted and now it appears to be working. I am still nervous of having the problem crop up again, but we shall see.

Thanks for all of your help.

Dave

[Helevitia]

I made my very first DVD yesterday

It was an old VHS tape of my son when he was very young.

There was way more to making a DVD than I anticipated. Good thing I had noob software to walk me though everything.

First I trimmed the video of excess junk. Once that was done, I added transitions, titles and music. I then got to the point where you create a menu and chapters. I didn't even think of this part. In my mind, I just imagined myself copying the tape to mpeg, then burning it to DVD, so menus and chapters were an added bonus. I really enjoyed making it and adding music to the menu screen and getting it all nice an purty

I can see me getting addicted to this.

I have one question though...

I told the vid capture software to record for "DVD Quality". It takes up about 4.8GB of space for 1 hour 20 minutes.

How can I fit a 2 hour vhs tape on a 4.7GB DVD?

Thanks,
Dave

[Brian Ellis]

If you want to do a really good job, capture in AVI, do your editing and convert to MPEG-2 only at the last minute. You choose a bitrate to suit the length of the project. It's impossible to tell you use such-and-such a bitrate, because much depends on the sound encoding, menus, etc. but you could try 4500 kbit/s for a 2 hour project. It can also depend on whether you use variable or constant bitrate and, if the former, the amount of movement in the clips.

IMHO, this is not something you can learn in 2 minutes because what suits some may not suit others, plus different software gives different results. Which DVD authoring software are you using?

[Helevitia]

Wow, didn't know there was so much to it. Thanks for the tips Brian

btw, I am using the free video capture software that came with my Video card. It is Cyberlink's Power Director 3. But it is a cut down version of the full version. I know it's probably crappy software but it works great for my limited knowledge.

Another question...

Last night I created a 4.8GB mpeg2 video. Before creating any menus, adding music, or adding anything at all, it was already telling me that I needed 5.6GB to burn it? What am I missing here? Is their that much overhead?

Thanks,
Dave

[xortam]

Originally posted by Helevitia
Wow, didn't know there was so much to it. ...

That's why people like DVDRs; they're easy to use for capture and DVD burning while supporting simple editing. You can export the video to a PC via optical media (I use DVD-RAM) and do more fancy editing/menuing there.

[RobAGD]

I am looking into a few differnt things as I am going to convert a bunch of Paintball VHS tapes to DVD. Given the nature of the way these VHS tapes and the vidoe is structured having the Menus is going to be very nice.

I have 2 or 3 Programs that came with DVD_R that I have bought. MyDVD, Power Director and one that I cant recall atm.

Any one use these with the RR or Marvel TV cards ?

-Robert

[Dr Mordrid]

It's not free, but one that's recently set me experimenting is MainConcept MPEG Encoder 1.4. The darned thing has a multi-format DirectShow capture module complete with a TV tuner.

Nope; no VfW capture card support yet, but I did talk to MainConcept about adding it in.

Dr. Mordrid

[areia]

Last night I created a 4.8GB mpeg2 video. Before creating any menus, adding music, or adding anything at all, it was already telling me that I needed 5.6GB to burn it? What am I missing here? Is their that much overhead?

Helevitia, are you out of space in your hd? That warning doesn't always means you will need all that space (5.6GB) on the dvdr, that overhead may be caused by program routines that generate temp files before the burning process. If your project is too big to fit in one dvdr your authoring application should warn you before burning process process starts.