What is a 'reasonable' frame drop rate with ATI Wonder?

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I bought an ATI TV wonder ve card and tried to convert VHS to VCD ( after I got the help from some experts from this site). I select medium quality VCD, 4mbit/s (I think so), the frame loss is 2-3%. Any one can tell me if this rate is normal? If too high, how to reduce it?

If I want to customize, which one should I choose, MPEG1 or MPEG2 and/or VISUAL MASKING? What bit rate?

Any ideas about using this card to capture video is greatly appreciated.

-- David (davidx58@hotmail.com), March 10, 2003

Answers

You should use the VCD template. Do not do what you did. Any frame loss is unacceptible. If you are dropping frames at 4 Mbps, you have a very underpowered PC. Sorry. You need the following settings for VCD - 1.115 Mbps MPEG-1 video, constant bit rate 224 Kbps audio 352x240 NTSC or 352x280 PAL resolution Don't use visual masking. The help you got is not so good if you were told to use 4 Mbps. That's not valid for VCD. You can do it, but what you get is not a valid VCD. It's what's called XVCD. http://www.vcdhelp.com has a lot of guides on making VCDs. Also, do not do anything on your PC while recording video. Don't surf the web, don't do anything while recording.

-- Root (root@yahoo.moc), March 11, 2003.

Thank you for your response.

questions #1: what software is good to convert captured file (from ATI tv wonder ve) to MPEG before I burn it to VCD? is TMPGEnc good?

#2: what software to burn VCD? Nero or VCDeasy?

-- David (davidx58@hotmail.com), March 11, 2003.


I own it read this info:

-You should have zero frame drops even with a 500 mhz machine if you have some drops your video will not match audio well, stop and start record again. -In properties chose the VCR tab and select VCD as your record option. VCD as you will learn is MPEG1 ONLY not mpeg2 although you can have an mpeg2 video file and convert with TMPGenc into vcd. -defragment your hard drive (might take a while if you havent done it) -On XP under Systemproperies\hardware\Device Manager\harddrive- properties... make sure to DISABLE "enable write-behin caching". FOR win 98 should be already disabled. this will dramatically reduce drops if you havent disabled! Daniel

-- Daniel (bonl1@cs.com), March 11, 2003.


Thank you for your response.

When I choose VCD, it shows 1.05mb/s, which is supposed to be 1.15mb/s. I can not change this preset. What can I do?

-- David (davidx58@hotmail.com), March 12, 2003.


You are right... For some reason ATI has their vcd setting at 1.05 MB per second. It should be 1.15MB. This hurts the quality even more since vcd is already crappy... But nonetheless you can actually record your video at higher bit rates, and then, convert to mpeg1vcd with tmpgenc which is what i do... This way you will take advantage of the 1.15 allowance. I get reasonable results like this and if your video source is like digital, then you will get better results. Go to vcdhelp.com also for even more help.

-- Daniel (bonl1@cs.com), March 12, 2003.


made a mistake above... you should have zero frame drops with a 500mhz machine if you record like 3Mbit video or even 4Mbits per second. If you try to record directly to VCD-mpeg1, your maschine will not be fast enough to produce it and you will lose frames. (i guess eventhough vcd video is much smaller in size it takes more encoding procedures and thats why you lose frames :/ Sorry, i hope this clarifies what i wrote above. Daniel

-- Daniel (bonl1@cs.com), March 17, 2003.

You are exactly right. I got <1% to 0 frame drop now. Thanks a lot.

-- David (davidx58@hotmail.com), March 17, 2003.

I have a question for ya.. whenever I try to record in DVD quality I get like 80-90% dropped frames..

I have a 1.5Ghz Pent 4 1.5 gig Sdram 120 gig harddrive..

ive fooled around with all the settings and cant seem to get it right.. any help??

-- steve (sjreilly@comcast.net), April 15, 2004.


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