Direct recording to mpeg instead of avi

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I can record VHS or Tv input as .avi file. Is there a way to record (capture) those inputs in mpeg format directly, instead going through avi and encording.

-- sam (samara@slpa.lk), June 01, 2001

Answers

Sure, all you have to do is buying a hardware capture card that has built in MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 encoder. for example, Dazzle DVC2 is one of them.

-- ktnwin (ktnwin@excite.com), June 01, 2001.

However, you should wonder why countless others are still going thru the pain of capturing in AVI then encoding to MPEG. It's really fun to find that out.

-- ktnwin (ktnwin@excite.com), June 01, 2001.

ilike it

-- thomas powell (zanechick2007@aol.com), June 01, 2001.

Well, you need to spend big bucks to get a real good MPEG1 hardware encoder. Or you can get a decent quality capture card and capture video in AVI then encode it to MPEG1. With software encoding, it can rival hardware MPEG1 and it also gives you the flexibilty to add/change.

-- Simon (sorry_no_email@nomail.com), June 01, 2001.

If your video card supports MPEG capture in hardware, the answer is yes. If not, you'll have to stick with AVI. But even if your card has this capability, there are several good reasons to ignore it:

(1) MPEG can't distinguish between signal and noise, so unless your source material is nearly perfect (DVD, satellite, digital cable, etc.), you won't be able to record a high-quality picture at VCD bitrates.

(2) On consumer-grade equipment, software encoding always gives better results than hardware encoding, particularly from noisy sources such as VHS tape.

(3) You can improve the quality of the picture using AVI-based image processing programs, which will allow you to remove most of the noise before the MPEG encoder wastes bits on it.

Of course, you can increase the MPEG capture bitrate to compensate for the presence of noise, but the files will have to be transcoded down to VCD bitrates before they can be used. This process takes as long as encoding from AVI and does nothing to improve the quality of the picture, so why bother?

-- anonymous (nospam@all.com), June 03, 2001.



i bought a hauppauge win tv pvr/pci tv+video pc recorder and it works very well capturing mpeg 1 directly in real time from my hi8 camcorder but its not so good recording from a vcr. Having said that i also have to find a edit programme to edit mpeg 1 but the quality is very good the win tv pvr card costs 186 british pounds and is worth every penny chris

-- chris wood (chriswood1999@yahoo.com), July 11, 2001.

You can use Ravisent CinePlayer DVR. It can record VCD Mpeg1 with no hardware encoder. I've got almost every episode of farscape recorded with it. It's about VCR quality but it works with my Hauppage WinTV PCI (not the PVR version).

It won't work in NT though (bummer because I wanted to upgrade)

-- dillenger69 (dillenger69@yahoo.com), September 01, 2001.


You can use Windows Movie Maker to automate it but it will record it in a wmv format

-- Rob (robinhood_of_the_web@hotmail.com), July 29, 2003.

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