Can anyone tell me how to capture very good quality video on my PC using the ATI 128 Pro 32MB. I tried capturing the video in MPEG-2 format. Nero accepts the file and I burn the video out to SVCD format. It plays fine in my DVD player, but the sound seems to be lagging behind the video and there are certain parts of the clips that it just kinda starts inserting blocks and so forth. Can anyone help.

-- (sdtran@hotmail.com), September 25, 2000

Answers

First of all, if you can, avoid capturing in MPEG1 or MPEG2. "Capture in MPEG2" I've discovered is a new advertising gimmick of so many capture cards out there that do not deliver, sadly. Capture in AVI using some codec, then encode that later to MPEG. MPEG is mainly a distribution format and capturing it properly needs a lot of resources: >700PIII, 256MB, etc. Your system may not be up to scratch that's why audio and video eventually get out of sync and blockiness occurs. Are you so pressed for time such that you can't waste any encoding?? Your ATI came with some AVI codecs of its own. Have you tried using these?? Alternatively you can download free codecs like PICVideo MJPEG and Huffyuv lossless and try these. You open your AVI files later in TMPGenc for example, choose filters, and encode. The MPEG files you produce this way are likely to be better looking and sounding. As an aside, Dazzle proclaims "make your own VCDs" on its DVC boxes. Those who do not know are taken away, only to discover later that indeed, they CAN make their own VCDs, but the video quality is something to puke by, especially capturing using Video CD MPEG-1 template. This they WON'T tell on the box.

-- MT (turk690@yahoo.com), September 26, 2000.

If you are insistant on doing direct to mpeg captures go to richa page and read up.

http://www.members.home.com/richa/

I recommend the cap to .avi method and downconvert using tmpgenc. Done properly can make a world of diffrence in the quality.

-- eric (eric@nospam.snowmoon.com), September 29, 2000.