Video capture

[walshy]

My mate at work wants to copy a load of city matches onto his PC and burn em to either VCD or buy a DVD burner. Does he just need a TV capture card to put em onto the HD and then burn em or do the capture cards have a time limit on em?
Any help welcome
Cheers fellas
Walshy

[wildpitch]

All depends what your source for the material is. If he wants to record the football off air as in what you see on yer TV, then you'll be able to do it with a tuner card. There's unlikely to be a time limit with the card, your limitation is likely to be with hard disc space as you'll need plenty spare.

[Jimmy]

I've just purchased a flippin top capture card with hardware mpeg2 encoder, have tried them in the past but generally dissapointed until now.

Its a compro live usb2 , got it from tekheads in Sheffield (MO on the net).

Don't know if you are interested but TV cards are a minefield.

[Mister_DJ]

I'm in the process of burning some stuff from VCR tape to disc. I was told the best/easiest way was to do it thru your camcorder as if u were recording directly from the camcorder to ur pc

Apparantly ur camcorder needs sommat called 'pass through' which converts the analogue picture to digital and then the PC can record it thru whatever software u use to edit.

I'm using a laptop to try and do it so not sure if this applys to a PC, but the way I'm trying to do it needs an interface card (IEEE 1394 To CardBus ???) and lead to connect to ur cam. My cam doesn't have pass thru so i'm waiting to borrow one to see if it deffo works.

The card and lead cost me £40 and I needed it anyhow to record from my cam to the laptop so if this works its a bonus..!!!

I'm in no way an expert so might be wrong, but the guy who told me all this is a pc nerd and friend of the missus so it may be hunky dory...

Mart

[JAZ]

Just get virtualdub, setup your chosen video codec in it (divX,Xvid etc) then capture and it converts to divX,Xvid etc on the fly.

[Mister_DJ]

Originally Posted by JAZ

Just get virtualdub, setup your chosen video codec in it (divX,Xvid etc) then capture and it converts to divX,Xvid etc on the fly.

Cheers Jaz for the info

(Sorry to hijack this thread guys.... )

As I said before I'm a pc feckwit so bear with me - does this mean I needn;t use a camcorder? If so, the only problem I have is the lead that comes with the card is one of those square jobs with a slight dent in the top. This fits into the camcorder no probs but there's no compatible socket on my vcr.

And final question - what is video codec??

Mart

[JAZ]

Well when I had my Radeon64 vivo (video in/video out) card I got one of those scart plugs that had a composite (yellow phono like plug) and the normal red/white audio left/right plugs.
If you have a dedicated video capture card it might have a s-video in connector on (this captures superior quality than a composite lead) so use that if you can, but it sounds like your card has a firewire in port which is for camcorders so to capture from vcr (if there isnt also a composite or s-video in) you will need some sort of convertor plug and Im sorry I have no experiance of those.
A video codec is a type of compression (think mp3 v's wav) mp3 has compression therefor sounds slightly inferior to wav but is a tenth of the size (e.g. a 4mb mp3 as a wav file would be about 40mb) thats just for sound so if your recording sound&pictures as you can imagine if its not compressed somehow the resulting file would be huge (say 30 minutes of video would prob work out 1gb+ (estimated) uncompressed & the same file would be only 300mb or so compressed).
For example you must have downloaded a dvd rip (even dvd quality is compressed a bit) and on the actual dvd it would have been 4gb+ and the film has been compressed with only a slight loss in quality to 700mb (to fit on a cdr) this has been acheived by using a type of video codec to compress the data, the most popular codecs that acheive the best compression whilst retaining quality are DivX and Xvid.
You more than likelly have these codecs on your computer allready so if you download virtual dub you can choose the capture option from the menu and set it up so the video/sound you capture is encoded "on the fly" from uncompressed video & wav sound to a compressed DivX and mp3 otherwise you will run out of space on your hardrive capturing only a small ammount of video.
Please dont think Im an expert on this as I aint, I only dabbled with it for a while when I had my Radeon card a few years ago, your best bet is too do research on the net as Im sure theres plenty of detailed guides, also it depends on the capture card you use, my friend had a card that was expensive but had a hardware encoder built in, also you might need a beefy PC to avoid dropping frames.
I'll help more if I can but as I said I only know the basics I've outlined above from my own experiance with one vivo video card.

[JAZ]

Originally Posted by JAZ

Well when I had my Radeon64 vivo (video in/video out) card I got one of those scart plugs that had a composite (yellow phono like plug) and the normal red/white audio left/right plugs.

Ok seemed to have lost my trail here so I'll continue,
I therefor plugged the composite plug and the audio left rights into the scart plug adaptor then plugged the scart into the vcr's out scart plug then the yellow compsite into the radeons composite in plug and the audio in to my soundcard, I then setup virtual dub to record from the radeon video in and to capture the sound from the soundcard.

Oh and the scart connector has to be an out version (you can get them with a switch to choose between in or out)

[Mister_DJ]

Jaz - this makes perfect reading. Superb!

Thank-you so much. I'm on the case this weekend to get this sorted once and for all!!

Cheers!

Mart