i have many problems with copying videos to dvds i use a 2gig p4 100ata segate an old aver tv card ( comp in ) and a new panasonic vcr. software nero capture/aver soft store vlarge avi files 1 gig/ 10 mins and then convert them after to mpeg problem 1: loose video and sound sink after 10 mins or so depending on drop outs and tape quality. problem 2: after i have crunched 20 gigs down to 4 gigs (24hours!)picture quality is poor. problem 3: cannot use real time compression as causes drop outs i'm looking at buying a analog video processor/enhancer and out put s-video. also a new tv card but don't know whether to go for usb or pci. Q.1 are there any tried and tested tv cards with hardware processing and compression on board that is reasonably priced. Q.2 any technical advice would be very appreciated Q.3 any special software/ hardware available. thanks paul
After a bit of experimenting with video capture, at this stage I can only comment on the software side. I have found that WinDVD Recorder 5 is a very good video capture program. It will capture the video in mpeg format giving you a choice of a number of quality settings, therefore you don't have to convert from .avi to .mpg. Bear in mind, each time you convert from one format to another, you are likely to degrade quality & possibly introduce audio/video sync problems. If you then use WinDVD Creator 2 to edit/author your movies, they should be in sync. I have had similar audio/video sync problems using Nero, TMPGEnc, DVDRemake, DVDLab, etc, etc, even though I regularly defrag my second HD which is dedicated solely to Video files. I have read numerous threads on this forum re sync problems, & even posted my own questions about it, all to no avail. Thus far the only success I have had in that area has been to use WinDVD. If your original captured files total 20 gig & you're compressing them down to 4 gig, then, yes, you are bound to have a lot of quality loss. The only alternative is to use less compression. Hope this helps a bit. Good luck.
I personally use an ATI AIW capture card and it will capture to many formats (MPEG2 or AVI with many options) straight from the ATI MMC software that comes with the video card. Encoding a 20gig AVI to 4gigs is probably not your problem it is more likely the encoder used or your settings (AVI will be very big compared to resulting MPEG2 encoded file). I use TMPGEnc Plus for encoding and have gotten good results. There are lots of tutorials on how to use this software at videohelp.com or digitalfaq.com are great resources.
