Digitising video tapes to MPEG - boringish computer question

Geeky AV answers ahoy!

Depends entirely on bitrate. We do most of out stuff at 7 Mbps MPEG-2 IBP, which is acceptable quality and weighs in at around 52 MB a minute.

MPEG-4 AVC (h.264) give an equivalent quality at 2Mbps and, unsup[risingly that weighs in at 15MB/min. However there are not many products that can digitise directly to h.264 in real time and certainly none at consumer prices. The best vector is via DV format video. Digitise to DV (25 Mbps) and then transcode to h.264. This will give you optimum quality. There are plenty of composite/S-VHS to DV (firewire) or USB 2.0 boxes out there. You can use basic apps to digitize to DV them QuickTime pro 7.0 will allow you to transcode to h.264.

I knew I'd get an Ed reply thanks :)

But woah, 52mb a MINUTE? Thats out of my (disk space) league. Unfortunately this is xfer from PAL VHS tapes straight to HDD, and its already shitty quality, so clarity isnt much an issue, but sound quality is (as it is music vids, and well, some Simpsons stuff) - I assume compression of any kind messes with the hifi integrity too?

Some of what youve mentioned sounds awfully mac-based - are there windoze progs you'd recommend for this?

xposts...

vcd (which is mpeg2) can handle 74 minutes on a cd at watchable quality

mpeg4 (aka divx) is newer encoding technology and i can get 1.5 hours of tv on a ccd at a much better quality (800kbps, but same resolution, half pal, 384x288). but these won't play in normal dvd players whereas vcd or svcd disks often will.

my tivo can do 20 hours on a 40G disk at much higher quality and resolution.

so i guess the answer is "it depends" 8)

> I'm using Windows XP.

ha, then you're on your own!

vcd is MPEG1

DVD and SVCD are MPEG-2 (SVCD is at 2CIF resoltuion rather than full frame PAL/NTSC, which is full number of PAL lines but half the number or pixels per line)

divx is and it isn't MPEG-4 it deviates from the standard quie a lot. I'd steer clear of it now h.264 is a reality.

Bah koogs ;P

Thanks guys - this is a good start - I admit some of its greek to me now but I will carefully research this before I encode, I'm not after production quality or anything but its nice to know what options I have.

bah yourself! ed seems to have overlooked the 'This is all new to me' part of the original question so i claim a moral victory even if i got the wrong version of mpeg that vcd uses 8) (he also missed that 384x288 is the overscanned resolution and vcd actually only uses 352x288!)

i'm sure there are packages on xp that'll do it all pretty much for you (i'm a linux bod and do everything with scripts so...). you'll also find yourself re-digitising everything you own several times as you work out newer and better settings / buy other equipment. there are lots of guides out there but they all say different things. still, it's a good excuse to dig out that copy of the smiths south bank show you haven't seen in 15 years so you can laugh at the adverts...

(/me goes away and looks to see if mencoder supports h.264...)

OK so maybe neither of you can answer this, being one mac and one linux-heads, but know any XP apps that'd do this? Maybe I should google for it hey. I feel out of my depth already! I knew the varying codecs and stuff were all over the place but man.

You will have problems trying this with laptop hardware, capture card technology is fiddly, do you have Firewire/1394a?

How many tapes do you have to digitise?

No firewire, no. It'd just be one of those PCM capture cards with a TV in/out thing, hell I dont even know what I'm doing really.

Im not worried about the amount of tapes - its an experiment at best right now - but yeah we're talking at least 2 3-hour PAL VHS tapes...

I guess the big question then is - am I wasting time with a laptop and capture card? Should I just buy a DVD recorder instead?

a firewire card is very cheap now.. and if you have a box that can spit out DV signal then windows XP should be able to record your DV stuff direct.

then it's just a case of finding the right transcoder.

although as well as space, you also have to make sure your hard disk drive is fast enough to actually write all the data on disk in time (or you'd start skipping frames, etc).

Argh.. the more you guys say the more Im thinking a proper DVDR box is a goer. I only wanted to avoid it cos I already have a dvd player. heh.

software: you'll probably get something bundled with the card when you buy it. start with that i guess 8)

the one i have used on win98 (yeah, i know) was ulead's VideoStudio http://www.ulead.com/vs/runme.htm and it was ok but i'm adverse to buying software and won't pirate it. i tried two or three in fact, trying to find a decent free one, but they all timed out before i got a feel for them so i wrote a bunch of linux bash scripts and use those for grabbing instead.

(a decent NLE is something that linux is sorely missing. avidemux is fine for frame-perfect cropping, which is all i usually need, but there's nothing more useful than that available)

This kind of thing is much easier on a desktop or a new model laptop. Video uses muchos HDD space and likes quickish HDDs, laptop drives tend to be slower 4200RPM drives with low cache which can lead to dropped frames, a hardware compression card like PVR150 can alleviate this as it it's compressing the video on the way in, but you need a desktop really

What make/model is your laptop? DO you have USB 2.0

Something like this may do.

http://www.hauppauge.com/pages/products/data_pvrusb2.html

It does MPEG2 Hardware compression.