Re: Encoding Videos

[Doogie Brodie <ukhad@xxxxxxx>]

Frost Neil wrote:

> I think I remember someone saying that they had copied videos (not
DVD's,
> the old fashioned things with tape and stuff) to their servers.
>
> What encoding process did you use, and what software?

I've been doing a reasonable amount of VHS capturing to put onto DVD,
but you can encode in something to keep on the server if you want.

Hardware:-

ATI Radeon 8500DV
Athlon 2000 XP
1GB RAM
4 120GB drives (2 RAID 0 arrays) - you don't need this much space, I
just need to have things at a variety of stages... :-)

Software:-

VirtualDub - Required
PicVideo MPEG codec - Depends on your processing
Various VirtualDub filters - Depends on video
Goldwave - Depends on video
TMPGEnc - Depends on your output

Process:-

Capture mode in VirtualDub, using PicVideo as the encoder - you can use
Huffyuv but it gives even bigger files..... pretty sure it'll encode
direct to DivX for you though if you've got enough grunt under the hood.

Due to quality of my video sources, a long filter chain in VirtualDub to
cleanup the source (15 year old cartoons) - you may find not necessary

Due to quality of my video sources, audio de-hiss in Goldwave, saving
the audio track as a WAV file

Encoding the processed AVI and the processed WAV file into MPEG-2 for DVD

Obviously depending on the quality of your source, and how you want to
store them (Mpeg, DivX, PicVideo, Huffyuv) will depend on exactly what
you do where.

I messed around for _ages_ to get the process right from VHS to a pretty
DVD all menu'd up etc, including buying a standards converting time base
corrector, due to the poor quality of some of the tapes, reading up on
filter chains, experimenting with various combinations etc. It's now in
a state where SWMBO does the processing herself and only asks me for
help if she gets _really_ stuck.....! :-)

Best place to read up on stuff is www.dvdrhelp.com, loads of articles
about different sorts of capturing, processing etc.

Let me know if I can be of any more help... :D

--

Doogie