Re: Video ripping question?

["Ian Lowe" <ian@xxxxxxx>]

Hardware:

ATI All-in Wonder 128 Pro. The same capture chipset as the Radeon, half the
price.

MPEG capture cards blow. you don't >want< MPEG-2 You only need to use
it if
you are going to VCD. as you aren't, you would be better with:

Codecs:
depends: if you are happy with .asx as a file format, download the windows
media encoder tools, and use the MPEG4v3 Codec. If you would prefer .avi
(which I recommend) then you should use the DivX ;-) be careful not to use
Angelpotion, as it is rather broken.

To do the actual capture use VirtualDub, and use the internal capture
engine
rather than the AVI compatibility mode.

I use settings of:

400x300, 25fps compressing straight to DivX using the fast motion codec
with
a keyframe every second, and a max bps setting of 2100. This captures an
episode of "The Simpsons" at a quality far in excess of my VCR.

I don't compress the audio during capture, but capture stereo CD quality
(172kbps) then compress it down to a DivX 8kbps (about as good as 128kbps
MP3 for normal dialog)

After full compression, I can fit a simpsons episode at VHS quality into
about 70Mb of diskspace (that's 22 minutes btw)