TV Capture Software

Hi, can anyone recommend some decent TV capturing software? i recently bought a tv card but the supplied software is pretty rubbish and the picture quality isnt great. I realise that it may be the card itself that is not very good but i'd like to try some different software to see if there is an improvement in quality.

[paulyoung666]

what make and model of card is it , and how are you captureing the picture , are you getting it from a cable box or aerial or what , i have mine fed direct from my sky digi box and it works fine using hauppages own software

I cant remember the brand at the moment, but its not a popular one(an ebay cheapie), seems solid enough though. I use the RF output from my STB directly to the card. The 'real-time' picture is good enough for viewing, its just the captured footage thats not very good. To get anything near decent I have to set it at the highest resolution and bitrate which results in ludicrously high file sizes. Anything less then its just not worth it.

Is there any other capture software I can try?

[Aragorn]

You do need large files for decent video!

On a DVD-R you get two hours of good quality TV on a 4.7Gb disk - that works out at over 2Gb/hour. Three hour mode is watchable but once you down to 1Gb/hour it is very poor.

I've not tried PC TV capture myself, but I would guess the same holds true for most packages.

Originally Posted by dgr1577

I cant remember the brand at the moment, but its not a popular one(an ebay cheapie), seems solid enough though. I use the RF output from my STB directly to the card. The 'real-time' picture is good enough for viewing, its just the captured footage thats not very good. To get anything near decent I have to set it at the highest resolution and bitrate which results in ludicrously high file sizes. Anything less then its just not worth it.

Is there any other capture software I can try?

I've used Showshifter before, but it was such a long time ago I can't remember what it was like.

Whatever software you use, I think you are going to have the same dilemma of trade off between file size & quality.

To get 'DVD' quality captures with my (ATI) card results in an 8Mb/s datastream for mpeg2 - big files indeed.

im not really looking for dvd quality with this. Would just like fairly decent and watchable recordings at a manageable file size. 5Gb for a half-hour programme seems excessive, especially when I can download a 1 hour tv capture from the net which is a 400Mb divx file and the quality is great.

Originally Posted by dgr1577

im not really looking for dvd quality with this. Would just like fairly decent and watchable recordings at a manageable file size. 5Gb for a half-hour programme seems excessive, especially when I can download a 1 hour tv capture from the net which is a 400Mb divx file and the quality is great.

It sounds like your card is recording with no compression. What you could try is using other software to compress the files 'offline'. It isn't something I know much about, though, so I can't really recommend a specific package, however, a google on 'AVI to Divx' should bring up a few options.

i can record with compression if i want to, its just that the quality is bad(i.e. i can capture straight to mpeg1,2 & 4 and also can manually change the bitrate and resolution if I want). The problem is if I want decent quality I have to record everything as raw avi format or as a compromise, 720x576(DVD PAL) at 6000 - 9000 bitrate, hence the big files. If I capture to vcd or svcd spec. then the quality is very poor. Capturing straight to divx isnt much good either.

I just want to try some different software to see what the difference is. Any ideas as to a decent software package?

[Mauldor]

Cannot say I have tried any of these but...


http://zoomoutktv.sourceforge.net/en/home.htm

http://www.doom9.org/index.html?/capture/start.html

Personally I stopped going that route ages ago due to the amount of work involved to be honest. Myself, I bought a DVD+RW Recorder, Record What I need and then put the DVD+RW Disk into the drive and use whatever software to cut and edit the adverts etc out. My thoughts are - a TV Card is fine for watching a Live stream on the desktop while you do some work but capturing is another story - as the card will have no dedicated hardware to compress the images - unless you buy a High end one.

Originally Posted by dgr1577

i can record with compression if i want to, its just that the quality is bad(i.e. i can capture straight to mpeg1,2 & 4 and also can manually change the bitrate and resolution if I want). The problem is if I want decent quality I have to record everything as raw avi format or as a compromise, 720x576(DVD PAL) at 6000 - 9000 bitrate, hence the big files. If I capture to vcd or svcd spec. then the quality is very poor. Capturing straight to divx isnt much good either.

I just want to try some different software to see what the difference is. Any ideas as to a decent software package?

as I said, the only other software I have tried with my capture card is Showshifter (it has been on a PC Format covermount, recently, IIRC).

However I wouldn't be surprised if you hit the same problem you have now, it sounds like the capture card does not have much hardware assistance for 'on the fly' compression. In this case I imagine any software solution will struggle to cope with so much data.

- I hope I'm wrong & someone else can suggest something....

[mrlipring]

What codec are you capturing to? What's the spec of your pc?

If you're capping from TV, as long as you capture at 640*480 or so, you should be ok quality wise.

If you've got loads of hard drive space, i'd advise you to cpture to huffyuv/uncompressed wav first, using IUvcr.

Then load it into virtualdub, trim it, deinterlace it and resize it, then make your output file an xvid. remember 2 passes. now delete the capture file, and you're sorted.


If you've got less hard drive space, but a fast CPU, i'd suggest HIGH bitrate mpeg2 or mpeg4 depending on what software you have.

If you don't have software that will capture to mpeg2, then for mpeg4 i'd suggest using IUvcr to capture to xvid. VERY high bitrate xvid. Give it 8mbit/sec and see how you go. If you're not dropping frames, you're laughing.

Once it's captured, load it into virtualdub-mpeg2 and do the trimming, deinterlacing and resizing like before, and output to xvid like above.

Ideally, you wouldn't capture to a lossy compression codec like mpeg2 or mpeg4, but if you're short on space, it can't be helped.

You'll get best results capturing to huffyuv and wav, then reencoding to xvid once it's captured. you should almost always never have the captured file as your end result, it won't be as efficient (size/quality) as you can get by doing a 2-pass encode, which you obviously can't do straight from capture.

By using a 2-pass encode, you can maximise quality for specific file sizes, and that makes it FAR easier to store your caps.