I have been converting avi/divx to mpg for SVCD and DVD for a couple of years, so I know exactly how frustrating it is when the audio of your finished movie drifs out of synch, and how much frustration and work it is to get it back in synch, if at all possible. Like many others, I own a big bunch of great VHS tapes I'd like to transfer to MPG2 files and burn onto DVDs. Hence.. i bought a Pinnacle PCTV card that was a total disaster when trying to capture to anything beyond 352 x 288, i.e.VCD quality, which I left behind more than a year ago when DVD burners became really cheap. In order to make my PCTV card to work, I tried every possible upgrade sw, and every patch and setting possible on different OS, Win98SE, Win2000, Win XP etc, etc.. Sounds familiar?? In my frustration I then bought a Pinnacle DC10+.. which I really never could get to work. Maybe the smiling salesman down in Bangkok deliberately sold me a defective card.. knowing he'd never ever see me again. So.. after spending days and nights f*****g around with this problem, I finally decided to try capturing from within one of the DVD authoring programs now on the market. To make a long story short, here's my success story: Clean, newly installed Win XP OS on my 1 Ghz PIII PC, 384 Mb RAM, 40 Gb hdd. Created a separate partition for captured files. Quite ordinary PC, it's my wife's.. my own PC is far too busy to use for capturing. Installed the PCTV Pro "pineapple" card with Rave software (PinnaclePCTVUpdate550.exe), just checked it working and then left it alone. Installed Ulead DVD Movie Factory. Selected Capturing, setting up parameters to fit DVD PAL, you know what I mean if you're familiar with MPG2 specs. Have you used TMPGEnc for encoding MPEG2 a couple of times you should be pretty familiar with all of these. Preliminary tests capturing 1 minute of video went marvellous, approx 33 Mb per minute, no audio synch problems. Wow, so far so good. I decided to reduce the "output quality" setting from 15 to 10, no noticable degradation in quality, but saved some file space. Finally, I captured an 85 minutes VHS and played it back. No audio synch problems and no jerky playback towards the end. Perfect. The final file was 3,3 Gb in size. Demultiplexed the file into separate video and audio using TMPGENc, because I wanted to use my ReelDVD for DVD authoring. Yes, of course I could have authored the movie in Ulead MovieFactory, but I like to put in menus and chapthers, etc. Then I went on to capture 3-4 other full length movies without ever having to restart MovieFactory. Brilliant. Yes, I have to add I tried capturing from within many free programs also, such as VirtualDub and others, usually limiting me to VCD quality. Try this, might work for you too.
If you used "Intervideo WinDVR 3.0" you would Get Much better Quality Plus be able to Capture directly to Dolby Digital Audio and have no Sync Problems because it has built in Algorythyms to compensate for Audio/Video time Drift...If you were encodeing your Files with a different encoder than Tmpgenc and Possibly decompressed the audio first you would not get sync problems..Tmpgenc treats Drop Frame and Non-Drop Frame Time codes the same which causes sync problems in the Encoded file..This has been a Problem since the creation of Tmpgenc and the author refuses to fix it or even agknowlege the Problem exists...Cheers
If you used "Intervideo WinDVR 3.0" you would Get Much better Quality Plus be able to Capture directly to Dolby Digital Audio and have no Sync Problems because it has built in Algorythyms to compensate for Audio/Video time Drift...If you were encodeing your Files with a different encoder than Tmpgenc and Possibly decompressed the audio first you would not get sync problems..Tmpgenc treats Drop Frame and Non-Drop Frame Time codes the same which causes sync problems in the Encoded file..This has been a Problem since the creation of Tmpgenc and the author refuses to fix it or even agknowlege the Problem exists...Cheers
WAHEY!!, i've been playing around with anologue capture for far too long, and been in transcoding and making VCD, SVCD , XVCD, DVD, ripping froms DVD, Ripping CDs, you name it i've done it, its been over one year, i've told myself that i woulnd come back to anologue capture beacse it gave me so much hell, audio sync and quality dropped frames i've been through it all... I turned my back on it and went aways towrds broadcast digital cameras(video) and now just out of boredom i decided to return to my "old" failthful website afterdawn.com u know "see" whats happin, when i discover this post, well what can i say, itwas too tempting, i really wanted to nail that old gost of mines, i've done everythig i had iniatlly wanted except anologue capture, well yes i do have lituarlyy over 10 hours of video on my comptuer all captured from various sources VCR, SATELAITE, TV, CAMCORDER(8mm) anyway, although the quality is ok it was for me any never satisfing why? well beacsue i couldnt get my damn capture card to go over that 352*288 limit, now you guys know that allthough the stated rez of VHS is 240 you and i know thats bullshit! its more like 576 (cuz its interlaced) basically if you capture at full D1 then down rez to half D1 or D2 then you well get the best VCD quality. One method that worked for my setup was too capture RAW uncompressed full 720*576 frames then encode that to mpeg2 or whatever i pleased,if your ever encoded RAW full frame footage to at 10 bit at highest two pass (using) TMPgenc it takes forever but the quality Mind blowing, lets jsut say that its as good as the orginal, BUT Thers a big BUT, (1) capturing RAW uncompressd eats your HDD like HOMeER too Donuts (2) its just too time consuming process, the encoding aint just worth it. So i've come to the conclusion: If you want to capture anologe video then youhave a few sensible option, (1) get a decent capture card, this is one of the most important factor in the whole process (2) get a beefy computer setup, video application is CPU and mem and HDD demading (3) Consider the following, get yourself a DVD recoder(standalone) and capture that way then rip the DVD and edit that way. (4) capture via miniDV camcorder then firewire the video to PC and edit transcode/ whatever Remember one thing it will never be as good as the orginal!! i'm off to et me self as DVD recoder i heard that Sainsbury is doing one for £199.99 thats a bargin i think the company is Mico (any good?) F*ck it who cares as long as it does the job, too be honest there was a time when i would captue anologe TV then painfully make a VCD then play that in my standalone DVD player, but the hassle aint worth it anymore, i just wanna hit the record button when i'm watching my fav program. Any ways Good luck, analogue capture takes too much time, unless you ave the rite hardware.
