Video Capture

[whipped]

I've been toying with the idea of capturing my collection of 100+ videos and then encoding them into DivX and storing them on CDs.

What I need is a decent video catupre card. Anyone have any recommendations?

 

[Tom]

What system do you have? HD speed is important, read my thread on 'striped xp drives', although I'm working on a paid-project so the demands are slightly higher.

What are you digitising from? Analogue or Digital?

 

[whipped]

I've got a 2 GHz AMD with a 7200RPM HDD. I'll be striping it as soon as I can afford another drive.

I'll be converting from an analog input. Basically plugging my video into the computer and pressing play.

The encoding is the easy bit. But I want to get some decent capture hapening. I'm not sure how I could do it digitally. S-video out from the video?

 

[Tom]

Well if you use S-video, you'll be increasing the demands on your system (chroma and luma)

If you use plain old composite video, you should be ok with what you have at the moment. I think I'm correct in saying that the size of the buffer on your HD is very important, any system pauses will result in jumpy, skippy, video capture.

I would stripe 2 drives (this is what I'm going to do), and capture onto those.

 

[whipped]

Cheers for the help. I'm pretty sure I can get it to work well now. Found a capture card for £99 that does MPEG 2 capture. Should be ok for what I need.

 

[Tom]

dont forget to defrag your drive

 

[smurkin]

If you code mpeg-2 with the correct settings, and have Nero, you can burn sVCD which will play on many of todays DVD players...personally, my DVD player wont play sVCD...but it will VCD which is nearly as good.

also...the quality can be really good if you have a good source and a decent coder (dont use Nero to code tho )...only problem is...a single movie takes 2-3 disks using this approach.

 

[MC Hammer]

Capturing from s-video or composite makes no difference on CPU load. If you use the right compression (ie. huffyuv), there should be absolutely no problems (frame drops, etc) with a 7200RPM hard drive. I get no problems capturing full screen on my 850mhz Athlon, this is using VirtualDub and huffyuv.

Obviously this doesn't apply for hardware mpeg-2 cards as they have their own software. If it is a hardware mpeg-2 card, it shouldn't be a problem at all for most systems as the card is doing ALL the work... the system just saves the stream. Software mpeg-2 isn't too impressive, it's usually better just to capture as AVI, then re-encode.

 

[whipped]

Yep, it's a hardware MPEG-2 Card. I'm going to pick one up next payday and start the crazy task of encoding my videos. I was thinking of turning them into VCD/SVCD as my DVD player will play them. But I have a very good TV out system from my PC into my home cinema system, so I'll just turn them into DivX and play them from CDs.