*****MOST IMPORTANT******
HELLO FRIENDS I HAVE A PROBLEM THAT IT TAKES LOT OF TIME TO CONVERT AVI FILE INTO MPEG.TO CONVERT AN AVI FILE OF 1 HOUR IT TAKES ABOUT 1.5 TO 2 HOURS TO ENCODE IT INTO MPEG.AS TO MAKE A VIDEO CD MPEG IS NEEDED.COULD ANY ONE PLEASE TELL ME THE SOFTWARE THAT CAN CAPTURE MOVIES DIRECTLY FROM MY TV TUNER CARD IN MPEG FORM SO THAT I WOULD DIRECTLY MAKE A VIDEO CD FROM IT. MY EMAIL ADDRESS IS : govind@paul.as

-- Govind Paul (govind@paul.as), March 05, 2002

Answers

Awww. It takes me 10 hours to convert 30 minutes of AVI to MPEG on a dual 733MHz system utilizing both cpus (TMPGEnc w/ high quality noise reduction and best motion compensation).

1) The best quality results by capturing AVI and converting to MPEG (using CCE or TMPGEnc). Mpeg encoding cards are notorious for their lack of quality (comparatively). If you want high quality mpeg capturing, you will pay dearly for it in hardware. Software will not compensate for a card w/o mpeg encoding or a slow system.

2) If you *do* decide to go direct-mpeg capturing, you will need A) a card capable of direct-mpeg capturing (Hauppage WinTV or ATI AIW Radeon, on the low end, for instance) and B) a very, very, very fast system (> 1.2 GHz, some would say 2.0GHz with 133-266 MHz bus, MMX and other bells and whistles) with very fast harddrive dedicated to capture (7200 RPM or better).

My system drops 20% frames recording AVI with audio at 480x480 (for SVCD). I capture audio and video separately to avoid this. For high resolution mpeg (>352x240), capture is almost impossible without a fast system. If someone has a better hardware/software solution that circumvents these limitations, I'm all eyes...

-- Robert Templeton (templer@vplayground.com), March 05, 2002.

ADSTech Pyro Platinum has all u need for zero dropped frames on fast PC: FireWire card and full Premiere 6. The ONLY other thing u need is a DV or D8 camcorder with an E-to-E mode and DV in/out (nearly all are nowadays). The idea here is to let the internal ADC of the camcorder do the digitizing; you are only feeding the digitized video onto the PC HDD; in effect the PC does no capturing. The advantages: you don't get all wrapped up with the vagaries of so many codecs and their performances or lack of it as u would using a normal video capture card; only one codec it is u have to contend with and this is DV type-2 AVI; zero dropped-frames; full 720x480 resolution, full stereo 48KHz, 16b audio. Disadvantages: you need at least an optimized 7200rpm HDD (you'll need this either way), a FireWire card, a DV or D8 camcorder, and Premiere 6. Instead of a camcorder, some opt to get a capture card that does the digitizing with the DV codec efficiently like the Matrox RT2500 or the Pinnacle DV500. To original poster Govind welcome to MPEGlandia where u either shell out the time or money to encode. How sweet that you can encode an hour's worth in just two hours. Pulling out all the stops and encoding an hour's worth of DV DVI to DVD-ready MPEG-2 with TMPGenc on a 1GHz PIII takes me AT LEAST 16 HOURS!!!!! Don't despair now. You'll get used to it.

-- Mehmet Tekdemir (turk690@yahoo.com), March 05, 2002.

Try WinVCR, Honestech TVR. These two can capture directly to MPEG1 or to VCD.

-- uh8meih8u (uh8meih8u@yahoo.com), March 12, 2002.