Hello, I am fairly new to the world of video and have just recently installed a Winfast tv capture card into my pc. I want to record tv shows and the football and then burn to dvd. However I am not quite sure about all the different formats mentioned here. For example I thought avi was a particular file format but from what I have read you can have divx or xvid avi files, and many others. How are you supposed to know what type of avi file you have? Also my tv card has many options to capture in such as mpeg-1, mpeg-2, mpeg-3 and mpeg-4 and also uncompressed avi. I was told that uncompressed avi would be the best option to capture in if I am going to do lots of editing. However I find that a 1 hour tv show produces a 20gb file size. I also couldnt open the file in Pinnacle Studio 10 for editing. When I tried to convert it using VSO it gave the following error message. warning Inpossible conversion: This file contains an A/V stream we are unable to decode. 5/02/2006 6:00:29 PM info Computed Frame Aspect Ratio : 1.3333 5/02/2006 6:00:29 PM info Stream#1 - Audio: pcm_s16le, 48000 Hz, stereo, 1536 kb/s 5/02/2006 6:00:29 PM info Stream#0 - Video: YUY2, 384x288, 25.00 fps 5/02/2006 6:00:29 PM info Found 2 Stream(s) - movie duration 01:02:46.204 So what exactly is this YUY2? Does this mean I can have an avi file thats divx, xvid or even YUY2? Its all very confusing. Does this mean a divx file is always an avi file as well? What format should I be capturing my tv shows in if I want to edit them and then convert them to dvd? Thanks for the help.
Indeed, AVI is not a format, but more like a "container" to hold video and audio streams. These streams can be compressed using all kinds of CODECs (COMpressor/DECompressor) like DV, DivX, Indeo etc. etc. etc. Check this for some more detail: http://www.digitalvideoclub.com/techinfo/avi.php There you can also find a link to G-spot, which you can use to analyze AVI-files. Uncompressed video is indeed very large and difficult to handle, so it is not recommended. MPEG (1, 2 or 4, there is no actual standard for MPEG-3) are standard formats defined by the Moving Picture Experts Group. If your final goal is to burn DVD's: the fomat used in DVD is MPEG-2. So you may want to capture directly to MPEG-2. However, this means that the incoming video needs to be converted to MPEG (this is usually called "encoding") in real-time. Encoding takes a lot of processing on your computer, so if you encode real-time, the quality will be limited. A better option is to capture in a format that uses less compression and then encode it to MPEG-2 later on with a good MPEG-encoder. The issue with MPEG is that the video frames are dependent of each other: certian frames are stored as interpolation of surrounding frames. This makes it a less suitable format to edit. Personally I would go for the codec that is used in digital camcorders: DV.
Thanks Tpfkas, I understand it a lot better now. I found in my capture card settings under avi that there are many different types of avi formats and one of them was DV like you suggested so I am going to try and capture with that. Thanks again.
I tried the dv encoder and when I started the capture it said failed to use the codec "dv video encoder" Any ideas why this might be? What other formats would you suggest?
Apparently your software has a problem to connect to the DV codec. I would suggest to install a third party DV codec. In the download area of the site I mentioned you can download the Panasonic DV codec. Once you install that, you should be able to select it in your capture software.
Okay I installed the Panasonic dv encoder and went itno my capture cards properties and selected it. However when I started to capture I got an error message Failed to use codec "panasonic dv codec" Any ideaas why it wont work?
Hmm, apparently the card does not connect use normal DirectShow filters. I have insufficient knowledge of the card to help you in that department. Another option that could be the problem is that you are treying to capture in a wrong frame size. DV only allows the standard framesizes for PAL and NTSC. Is your card by any chance a Leadtek WinFast PVR2000? If this is the case: it has a hardware MPEG-encoder on board. This means that the encoding process is carried out on the card itself and not by the CPU of your PC so it may be able to capture in MPEG-2 in real-time in decent quality. The only issue you may run into is editing, but if you only wnat to cut out pieces you can get away with it. If it is another card that does not have a hardware encoder on board, I would recommend to test other AVI options. Just make sure you use low compression / high quality settings.
It has no hardware MPEG encoder on board, so probably better to capture in a low compression AVI. But I would just test the quality when you capture directly in MPEG-2 and see if it is good enough for you.
When you mean low compression/high compression, what and where in the capture software are you referring to? Also where and how does bitrate come into play with regards to video quality.
