How to capture best quality w/ATI AIW 128 PRO 32MB for VCD

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I recently purchased ATI AIW 128 PRO 32M capture card. Will be converting 8mm camcorder home videos to VCD. I understand the process but have a question on bitrate and resolution for the best quality capture. I have about 6.5G available disk space. I am running a Celeron 900Mhz w/256MB ram and using a 5400 10G IDE card. I need to play with settings for the capture and was wondering if I should capture at highest bitrate as possible or highest resolution in order to get a decent VCD to be played on my standalone DVD player? I want the best quality I can get with above conditions. I am able to capture in mpeg2 but at what resolution and bitrate? I can deinterlace and resample using TmpGenc or AVI2VCD application. Would this be comparable as capturing the video in mpeg1 in the first place? (which the ATI can do in realtime). I don't know if the quality would be any different if I were to use AVI as a capture choice at first and then convert to mpeg1? Any suggestions would be highly appreciated. Thanks!

-- Ramon (rayban@ev1.net), January 10, 2002

Answers

It's difficult to answer your questions because there are a lot of things to consider. Are you planning on playing your VCDs on a DVD player? Go to www.vcdhelp.com and check the DVD player compatibility list to see if your player even supports CD-R media. You also should check to see if it supports XVCD. Recording VCD at higher resolutions or bit rates will improve the quality, the question is, will your DVD player play it? It's not a problem for PCs to play these files, but DVD players vary in what they'll allow you to do in deviating from VCD standards. I will be honest with you - I'm not a big fan of ATI's cards. They do real-time software encoding and it always loses to a dedicated hardware capture card like Dazzle's DVC II. Your best bet for quality is to capture in AVI format using a lossless codec like Huffy and then convert to MPEG-1 video. You do not have enough disk space to do this, so you have no choice - you will have to capture in MPEG-1 format. I don't recommend capturing in MPEG-2 and converting to MPEG-1. It will not improve your quality at all and may make it worse. You will have to record directly in MPEG-1 at whatever bit rates and resolutions you want and hope for the best. If you are someday able to buy yourself another much larger hard disk, you can consider capturing to AVI and converting using something like TMPGenc. AVI conversions to MPEG-1 using a good software encoder is really the best way to go in terms of quality.

-- Jason (Jason.Shumate@equant.com), January 10, 2002.

First, sorry but u shouldn't be caught dead capturing video with a Celeron and a 5400rpm drive, which at 6.5GB drive free space is too small anyway. No matter what optimizations u will do to your system those two things will always get in the way of efficient full-frame capture. Video capture is one of the most difficult things u can ask any PC to do and in this day and age the minimum is AT LEAST P3 500MHz and a SEPARATE 7200rpm UltraATA100 capture drive, at least 20GB to be anything decent. Then u have to set up your PC for video capture, details of which you can find in such sites as www.inmatrix.com, www.videoguys.com, and www.destopvideoworld.com, www.geocities.com/aussie01au, etc. Lastly, at least judging from the number and type of entries ATI AIW has received in this forum it is not the most friendly capture device to be had for the money, despite what the salesman may have told u. This may sound brusque and sharp but video capture is not to be taken cavalierly, and at one point u will agree with me.

-- Mehmet Tekdemir (turk690@yahoo.com), January 12, 2002.

Check my answer to this other question at http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=008S96

Hope this helps.

-- Jim J. Donaldson (jimjohnd@bright.net), March 21, 2002.


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