Re: Video ripping question?

["Ian Lowe" <ian@xxxxxxx>]

> OK Ian ... you seem to know your stuff on this and we've touched on
this
> before.

Yeah, it comes up every now and again. It's this whole idea of a home media
server/entertainment appliance.

> Some people seem to love the ATI All-In-Wonder 128 card and some
reckon it
> sucks ... as before I'm still trying to spec out a machine to work
primarily
> as an image processing machine (for digital stills) and for use as a
hard
> disc recorder.

The thing I have noticed, and left out last night on account of sleep, is
that thos who dislike it tend to be using ATI's own codecs for capturing.
whilst these produce reasonably small files, they also reduce eveything
down
to 12-bit colour, which has a noticeable degradation.

I use CUY2 as my primary format (I think. It might be CUYV. I'll check
tonight)

> Hard disc space won't be an issue but image quality is ... I'm looking
at
> wanting to use full frame (which when I used to program video graphics
meant
> 768x574 resolution for PAL) and without dropping frames ... I'm also
looking
> for DVD (or better) quality. This would be used with a CRT projector
on a
> 7ft wide screen and I can promise you that even S-VHS is unwatchably
bad
> when blown up that big!
>
> Is the ATI up to that? I've been told to try the Matrox G450 TV card
but
> haven't been to look yet.

Probably not, but it's highly unlikely that >any< solution will
deliver that
sort of quality except from analog terrestrial. Standard VHS VCRs only
deliver half PAL resolution, at 270 or so lines, and sky digital (which is
my usual capture source) has considerably MPEg artifacting already present
in the video, which does look a bit ropey on a large screen if you are
looking for it.

That leaves DVD as a source, and to my mind, a moot one: if you already
have
the DVD, why would you put up with any reduction in video/audio quality
rather than just watch the original?

As always, however, these things are a personal opinion, and certainly not
gospel. There are not, however, many good sites about video capture etc.

Ian.



> Phil
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Ian Lowe [mailto:ian@xxxxxxx]
> > Sent: 20 February 2001 22:03
> > To: ukha_d@xxxxxxx
> > Subject: Re: [ukha_d] Video ripping question?
> >
> >
> > 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)
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
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