Is WINTV good enough

[Newtonn]

Hello

Before I start to go away and burn up a few hours playing with TMPGenc & VirtualDub. Can anyone tell me whether a WINTV is good enough to capture Video with... I have a Hi-8 Camcorder plugged into the S-Video socket and have captured down to a SVCD. I was not impressed with the output. The capture is using the Huffyuv codec and results in a 4gb file for 20mins. I Then used TMPGenc to create the MPEG2 (472Mb) using the max quality options. This took 10 hours on a 800Mhz machine to convert.
Has anyone got good results using this card - if so I will look to my parameters on the apps.

Many Thanks Neil

[benderman]

The WinTV is a really good capture-card but the quality of the captured video depends much on the input-quality. Maybe better cables from your Hi-8 to your card can improve the quality. If you think that the bad quality depends on the codec, capture a short clip with RGB24/uncompressed. If you compress the video directly while capturing, you should use a noise-reduction-filter.

[Newtonn]

Thanks BenderMan..

I have now started to look at the software instead of the card. I am trying to get the same quality on the SVCD as I can get by plugging the Camera directly into the TV's composite port. Unfortunately I have not achieved this yet...
I have tried several methods to do this. One question you may be able to answer... If I feed a signal into the WINTV card could I expect to see the same quality on my PC screen as I get by feeding into the TV.... Cos I don't...

Regards Neil

[benderman]

Should be same as on the TV except that the tv smooths the video a bit, so you don't see the interlacing. How do you connect the camera? If you connect it to the 5-pin-s-video-connector it should be a little better than through antenna.

[Newtonn]

Yep,


I am using the S-Video Lead. It looks OK in a small window but loses definition and sharpness when pushed out to full screen TV mode.
I have run the diags and my system spec passes all the tests for compatibility. I also have the auto adjust resolution changes options set - and that seems to work OK. Perhapes I will go get a decent S-Video lead as per your previous suggestion. I think mine is OK but it is probably worth trying to eliminate the easy things first..

Thanks
Neil