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Old 2007-03-08, 01:26 AM
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nibbles nibbles is offline
 
Join Date: Apr 2005
Location: California
Re: VHS to DVD capture

Canopus devices are well respected because they do an excellent job and use firewire to transfer the encoded video to your computer. The downside to anything that encodes your VHS directly to MPEG-2 or DV is that you can't post-process it at all without having to encode a 2nd time to MPEG-2, which compounds the degredation and is generally frowned upon, because MPEG-2 encoding is lossy. You also shoot yourself in the foot if you want to make an H264/AVC version for BlueRay/HD-DVD. The other problem with direct encoding to MPEG-2 is that it might do CBR well, but if it thinks it can do VBR, it will be 1-pass VBR, which isn't the proper way to do VBR as you may know. When shopping for something to encode directly to MPEG-2, check out if it masks the head switching noise, that stuff at the bottom of the frame, which looks awful when viewed on a computer. Also check out if it can capture the full frame at 704x480 without resizing because that maintains the correct aspect ratio when authored with Display Aspect Ratio 4:3 to DVD. In case that doesn't make a lot of sense, what I mean is a circle that you see on your VHS tape will turn out as a circle when you view the DVD on a PC or on a standalone rather than looking like an oval. An alternative is to capture at 640x480 which some people feel is fine. There's a ton of info on Doom9 about preserving aspect ratios from people like scharfis_brain.

If you want a PCI based card to do analog captures, two excellent options are the Hauppage (sp?) 150 I think it's called and any Ati 650pro based card like the TV Wonder 650 that I use or the one by Sapphire. With these you can encode directly to MPEG-2 or encode to lossless Huffyuv for post-processing fun and multi-pass VBR encodes using CCE to MPEG-2 or encodes for BlueRay. These cards support WDM, which is what you'll want because it's more recent and works well with Virtual VCR and iuVCR from iulabs. The older VFW based capture cards that work with VDubMod don't behave well with XP from what I've read. Ati has both 32bit and 64bit WDM drivers. NVidia who I used to swear by hasn't bothered to release any 64bit WDM drivers ever, and refuses to update their Sept. 2005 WDM drivers for any GeForce video cards with VIVO (S-Video in), because if they do, M$ told them they have to make 64bit drivers too, and they're too busy making money off XBox and NForce chipsets to care about video cards anymore. Check out Ananadtech for some recent capture card comparisons, and of course ask at Doom9 on their forums. Just don't use the word "best," which as you may know is against their rules because best is subjective.

Ok, good luck. nibs
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