i am capturing using my ati all in whonder pro,encoding with xing encoder, along with easy cd delux,my question is that when i capture an avi, i use what i believe to be the best quality settings, the avi quality is acceptable, but the mpg encoding prosses downgrades the quality severly. i have read that others have made vhs quality files, do you need a hardware card for vhs quality, or are my setting wrong?

-- evan young (evan@cdyoung.com), July 22, 1999

Answers

The quality will be better is you use capture s video instead of composite. Anyhow, videos looks worse on the monitor because the Xing Encoder adjusts the settings that are meant to be viewed on the tv screen. As a result, the quality appears darker on the monitor but correct on the tv screen. The videos are even much better if you play your vcds on a stand alone vcd player.

-- (jellyrol@sfsu.edu), July 23, 1999.

It is true that when you look at an MPEG on a PC monitor, it looks dark and not very good but it also matters what avi2mpg encoder you are using.

Xing, is renowned to be one of the worst avi2mpeg encoders as far as picture quality is concerned (at least to professionals like myself). The best avi2mpeg encoder is by far Heuris MPEG Professional. It provides the very best quality encoding. Xing is used for speed encoding and Heuris is for quality.

You need to do the following:

1. Capture a using a VCR with S-Video output 2. Use maximum quality settings when capturing to avi 3. Use a better avi2mpeg encoder like heuris mpeg pro (or even lsx encoder or panasonic encoder, or megapeg)

Or you can do the following:

1. Get a better MJPEG capture board with hardware mjpeg capturing (like a miro or iomega buz) 2. Get an MPEG capture device that captures directly to MPEG-1 (like a Data Translations Broadway Pro or Darim MPEGator)

Hope this helps

P.S. I mentioned some software in this post but please don't email me asking where to get it or if I can give it to you

-- MrVCD (mrvcd@tsoft.com), July 23, 1999.