Topic: recording as mpeg?

ok, i have a tv-card in my computer and i can watch tv-channels now. great.

now, how can i record this? which programs do you recommend? is it possible to record directly as mpeg2? or do i have to record it undecoded first and run an mpeg decoder over it later? can adobe premiere record from a tv-card?

Well, it all depends on the card you have and what software you have installed. Usually, most tv-cards do raw captures (about 100 megs for 10 secs of film...ouch!), which is mpeg-1, uncompressed. If you have the decoders installed, you can tell the card to capture to whatever format you'd like. However, some of the better compression formats take quite a bit of processing power so doing them on the fly is a bit of a pain sometimes, and you'll drop some frames.

If your computer can handle on-the-fly compression, then go for it. If not, I'd free up a lot of space and record in raw format. Then, use a third party prog to do the compression. Divx is an mpeg-4 compression format that should give good quality with low file sizes. You'll need the divx decoder to watch the movie, but I've never had any problems with it so far.

i have a hauppauge wintv theatre card which supports dolby digital and a resolution of 1600x1200...

i've been playing around with this and looking for ressources on the net a little bit. i think most videos are captured at 320x240 and 30fps. this seems to be some kind of standard for video capturing. also i found out, that you need a fast, real fast harddrive if you wanna capture uncompressed!

anyone knows some good tools, programs for capturing and compressing? i tried to capture in adobe premiere 6, but that just doesnt find my tvcard, though it is installed properly!

edit: damned english grammar



[This message has been edited by GRUMBLE (edited 06-25-2001).]

Actually, for a good copy I'd recommend at least 640x480. Then again, looking at a page on the card you have, it says your max video resolution is 384x288 so that kinda ***.

And yes, you'll need a really big harddrive to capture uncompressed. Usually, the capture software should come with the card. In your case it would be WinTV2000. Using that software, you can capture the avi to your harddrive. Look in your manual for the actual instructions. Once you have the avi, then you can use third party software to compress. Check out www.vcdhelp.com for some good codecs.

hell, silence, you're right! i didnt know, there is a difference between the display res. (which is 1600 indeed) and the recording res. (which is only poor 384).

anybody knows virtualdub? i found it very interesting, though it crashes very often.

virtualdub is a good program, and it's been pretty stable on my system.

once again, i have to thank you silence, for the GREAT link to www.vcdhelp.com !
that site is awesome! you'll find every information you have always wanted! their tutorials and stepbystep instructions are good too! i can only recommend this site if you're onto capturing/editing/converting.

ooh.. this might be a goo time to ask.. hey! what avi->mpg/mpeg(1/2) compression program would you guys say is good? currently i have a demo for honestech MPEG Encoder 2.5.. It doesn't seem too bad.


» THOAN.net (..soon to come..I hope)

i use TMPGEnc - FREEWARE!

for capturing i can recommend the huffyuv codec.