hello everyone i just purchased a mercury tv tuner card cos i wanna capture all my hi 8 camcorder videos to hardisk and then put on a cd but the way things are going it aint gonna happen! well i managed to capture my film onto my hardisk just using the simple software thats with the card and theres 5 files totally to over 20 gig. i captured the film in avi which i know is bigger then mpeg but i did this cos the quality with mpeg was pants so i thought i would capture it in avi and then compress with dr divx but cos im going from 20 gig to bout 600 meg the quality aint good. any help would be brilliant as i really wanna get this 20 gig file of my comp thanks alot.
If you want to keep a high quality video from your Hi8, then you need to have a DVD burner. The price for the burner is very cheap now (~$150). After you got the AVI file from the capture, you will need an encoder program to generate mpeg2 file, then using any authorize program to burn it to DVD.
If lossy capture is acceptable to you (and it seems the case given 20GB captures), then you should probably capture encoded video. What i mean is that, as you are capturing the video stream, you are also encoding it. Try out DivX/XviD. Once you've captured ur sequence, encode to MPEG for (S)VCD or DVD or whatever.