[drkdiggler]

Hi guys, I am putting together a system for some friends of mine and I'd like to know what the easiest software/hardware solution would be for them to copy their video from an analog camcorder to a DVD. I personally use the XCapture in my HTPC but it doesnt come with any software and they aren't too computer savvy, so I need this solution to be point click and shoot. Thanks!

 

[drkdiggler]

bump

 

[stanger89]

The easiest method would be to get something like the WinTV PVR 250 which can capture a DVD compliant MPG file. Since the card does the encoding it would save a lot of time/effort/CPU Power encoding the video.Then get Womble MPEGVCR if they want to do a lot of cutting; Womble can cut things like commercial (just an example) without re-encoding the whole file.

 

[Scotty L]

I've heard DVD-Lab is a great DVD authoring program. It even has the option to be bundled with TMPGEnc, a very good mpeg-2 encoder.

http://dvdlab.net/dvdlab/

 

[drkdiggler]

Does DVD lab have easy to use screens for capture as well?

 

[Valnar]

The most reliable method to capture analog video to a PC is with VirtualVCR. Great little (free) capture application and it keeps audio + video in sync. Of course, you still need applications to do something with it afterwards. I use MPJEG as a compressor so it is "lightly" compressed with no loss of quality and then convert to MPEG2 or DivX offline.


-Robert

 

[drkdiggler]

Robert, does it let you choose which codec to capture with? I was thinking of just going to AVI even though it eats up tons of disk space, but is lossless, but is MPJEG pretty good?

 

[Kayle]

VirtualVCR lets you choose any codec available to DirectShow. Not all codecs will work though.


All MJPEG codecs I've tried allow you to control quality/bitrate. With good MJPEG codecs at very high bitrates, the average difference of the pixel channel values between the original pixels and after a compression/decompression cycle can be much less than 1, i.e. the vast majority of the pixels are identical. However, at these quality settings, a true lossless codec usually will have a lower bitrate on most scenes.


Getting back to the original question, I think a PCI MPEG-2 encoder card is likely to be the easiest and most reliable, but editing is complicated. A step down in ease , a step up in editability, and about as reliable is something like a Canopus ADVC-100 hooked up to a firewire card. VirtualVCR and an analog video capture card is another step down in ease of use and reliability.

 

[drkdiggler]

I got them an XCapture card and I will put Virtual VCR on the computer. I figure that this should be good enough for them as long as I walk them through the process a few times.

 

[kkrull]

I recommend ScenalyzerLive for capture since it has the option to stop on dropped frames. I use this for Hi8\\Digital8 over firewire. (I didn't see what kind of analog you are capturing.)


Does anyone know of other capture software that will stop when frames are dropped?


Also, I would like to see a tool that will mark where the scene changes are in a file (by frames) without modifying the file. ScenalyzerLive will do it modifying the file and you can't undo it when the software guesses wrong, so I usually leave that option off.