Framegrab/compression program suggestions?

[Guden Oden]

In a fit of weird inspiration or whatever, I thought I'd get my somewhat crappy ol' Hauppauge Wintheater board up and running. It's got stereo sound, radio tuner, tons of stuff and the driver can (at least in theory) do video capturing so it can work as a VCR, but I never actually got that running.

So, what is a neat framegrabbing program? And no, before anyone suggests it, AVI_IO is a piece of shite, both me and a friend of mine had the worst of luck with it. I'd happily accept other suggestions though - that can be downloaded and tried for free off the web that is. It can be demo versions, I just want to f*ck around a little and see what results I can get on this ancient hardware.

Also, what's a good codec to use - and with what settings - for full-frame PAL res (25fps, 720*576 pixels)? Windows Media 9, maybe? But what settings? There's a MILLION goddamn parameters to tweak and I don't know what they do. Note, my CPU is a not particulary fast P4 1.7, and the capture card produces less than stellar results, so super quality settings probably won't work too well I guess.


Disjointed thought: from what I can see, the overlay of my new Radeon 9800 seems much better than my old GF3's, the hardware deinterlacing seems to work a charm I really must say! I was getting me poor eyes jittered out of me before, interlace shimmering really isn't pretty to look at on a computer monitor.

 

[pcchen]

If you are fairly familiar to the video capture things, you can try iuVCR. It's a little program without much fancy user interface, but it works pretty well for me.

 

[Guden Oden]

Thanks for the advice, but I'm having very little luck with it. Hauppauge's drivers aren't good for video capture even four years after I bought the TV card.

 

[Mark0]

http://www.virtualdub.org

Bye!

 

[Zaphod]

Thanks for the advice, but I'm having very little luck with it. Hauppauge's drivers aren't good for video capture even four years after I bought the TV card.

What capture chip is your card based on? If it is a BT878 you could give these driveres a try. They have served me well on a number of cards and have always worked much better than what the manufacturer has provided.

 

[Guden Oden]

Yeah, it's a BT878 chipset... I'm a bit hesitant to replace the drivers, because I'd have to find new TV tuner software too I guess. I don't think Hauppauge's stuff would work with 3rd-party drivers.

You have any recommendations there?

 

[Zaphod]

Yeah, it's a BT878 chipset... I'm a bit hesitant to replace the drivers, because I'd have to find new TV tuner software too I guess. I don't think Hauppauge's stuff would work with 3rd-party drivers.

You have any recommendations there?

At least some 'original software' will work fine with the alternate drivers. Both the Terratec I have in this PC and some other company's software (don't remember which) worked with an option to look for all capture cards that was listed in the 'readme'.

Personally I like ATV2000. Along with the above drivers it's the only combo I have found that has allowed me to get full frame PAL captures with decent quality. It should work on most, if not all, BT878 cards (allthough some might need some fiddeling with manual settings). The only problem I have with the latest version ist that there still seems to be a bug with the audio compression settings. It works fine, but settings doesn't 'stick' between sessions or in capture profiles.

It might be worthwile to check out http://www.tv-cards.com/ for links to other applications.

Edit: Just gave iuVCR a try again as it's been ages since I tried and discarded it the last time. Not pretty, but very functional and seemed to work very well. Give it another chance with the alternate drivers if other alternatives doesn't work out.