More VirtualDub woes for recording Dune.

[Lord Evermore]

The backstory

Okay, the TV Wonder simply would not output sound to VirtualDub, no matter what source I used or what sound connections I used. I could only conclude it was due to the drivers.

I've now gotten the WinTV+FM working in VirtualDub, so that I can record video. But there were caveats. With the Video For Windows drivers, which are the only ones supplied on CD, VirtualDub could not connect to the WinTV, even though it was sitting there displaying the video and playing audio. I was already using the latest drivers, and I was already farther than I'd gotten with the TV Wonder in that I had sound (except that the TVW could capture video, just no audio). I was reading the instruction manual for the WinTV and saw the section about capturing video, and it actually supposedly used a separate program for video capture, not just when you're watching TV and you hit the 'Capture' button to start. That hadn't been installed, so I looked for it on CD, and it wasn't even there, and wasn't an option in the installation program when I ran that. I had already downloaded the newest version of their TV program as well, which was supposed to include the video capture option in it, and I didn't have that button when I ran it.

So I looked online and they had the capture program on their web site. But they also had the Windows Driver Model (WDM) drivers on the site, which they hadn't included on the CD either. So I downloaded those and installed them. After that, their newest TV software version had the capture button, and VirtualDub was able to connect and record video. Plus, I gained the ability to change channels in VirtualDub as I was able to with the VoodooTV.

It then occurred to me that the TV Wonder also used VFW drivers, not WDM, and when I was using the VoodooTV, I was using WDM as well. So apparently the channel changing option is only functional when using WDM drivers.

So now I can record video, and I can change channels in VirtualDub, and everything seems to be okay. But I can't display/record higher than 320x240...But I know I could resize it to 640x480 in VirtualDub when using the VFW drivers...so I changed drivers, and yep, I could go higher with the VFW's, but of course still couldn't record. So I went back to WDM, and the same limitation occurs in the WinTV software.

So I've resigned myself to only being able to capture in 320x240, but it will definitely be at 30 frames per second now (or 29.957 or whatever it is NTSC uses; of course I never could test 640x480 mode to see if my system could handle 30fps at that resolution; it's only doing a bit under 5MB a second now).

Now my problem is the file size. I've got plenty of drive space to record the first episode in the miniseries, and maybe even the second. However I can't get VirtualDub to record anything larger than a 4GB file. At first I had multi-segment recording turned on, and for some reason it failed at 2GB. Then when I read about how VD creates larger than 2GB files, I just left multi-segment off, since Media Player can handle larger files, and I was only going to be using VD to view it in order to compress the file later. So now when it hits 4GB, VirtualDub errors out saying that there was an AVIOutput error and it's an invalid format. When I check the properties of the output file, it's listed as an invalid format as well (in Windows Media Player).

So, am I not going to be able to create anything but 4GB files or less, and have to use multisegment? If so, how do I make multisegment work properly (the help file isn't very clear on it)?

I need to get this all figured out tonight, since the show starts tomorrow, and I still have to make sure that I can encode the entire episode each night within 22 hours before the next one starts.

 

[office boy]

Er how about I just send you the DivX?
Our you just copy it to VCR?

 

[Lord Evermore]

I'm going to record to VHS as well, but I want a digital copy just because I can. (Reminds me I need to buy a VCR tomorrow as well.) And yes this will be a total of probably 600 to 700 dollars just for recording a miniseries. 306 for the hard drives, 200 for the two different capture cards which can no longer be returned, and whatever the VCR costs me plus blank video tapes.

If you already have a DiVX copy, how'd you get it? If you mean wait till you've made one then let you send it to me, thanks, but I want it done my way on my system. I'm recording uncompressed video first, in order to avoid loss of frames as much as possible due to trying to encode on the fly, then I'll be compressing it afterwards. I was hoping to get 640x480 out of it, but I guess that's not going to happen.

 

[office boy]

Yeah I wish I could help, But I have 0 TV card experiance.
and I got the movie Dune from an FTP a while ago.

 

[Lord Evermore]

This is not the 1980's movie, this is a new mini-series produced for the Sci-Fi channel. It's a 6 hour long thing over 3 nights. I have the original Dune on DVD already.

 

[office boy]

hmmm... haven't heard of it then... whats it about? (dunes? )

 

[Viper22]

www.scifi.com/dune

Viper22

 

[Floyd]

Whew chief, I didn't realize you had started a new thread...almost looked over it.

First of all, are you working in Win98 or 2k? To the best of my knowledge, ATI's products are limited to 320x240 in Win2k, but full 640x480 in Win98. Also, that's very strange that the TV Wonder wouldn't output sound to VirtualDub...I would expect it to behave just like an All in Wonder (which I use).

I can tell you this, it wouldn't be a good idea to capture at 320x240 and then expand to 640x480 to compress. Reason being, MPEG4 compression codecs do not handle the interpolation well...the fuzziness which results from expansion will increase file sizes because the codec tries to preserve all the detail. The reverse works very well. Capture at full size, shrink (with bilinear filter, not bicubic), and compress. The sharp image which results compresses very well, and when expanded to full screen during playback can look very good.

About multisegment capture, there does indeed seem to be an issue with VirtualDub. For some strange reason, if you set the starting file on a particular drive, subsequent files will not be written to the same drive as you would logically expect. There is a way around it. Set your initial capture file to, say, drive C: and then define drive D: as a capture drive under Capture->Capture drives... Once the the first file on drive C: reaches the specified file size, VirtualDub will shift to drive D: and then successfully capture the remainder of the stream into sequential numbered files. I don't know why it works this way, but I've not been able to make it capture segmented AVI's to a single drive. Needless to say, you only need a couple of gigs on drive "C:" and you should use your big RAID array as drive "D:".

Another good capture program is AVI_IO, perhaps you might try it instead (PM me if you need info). I still prefer VirtualDub because I know it well, but that's a pretty subjective choice...both seem to perform equally well during capture.

Or, if you're using Win2k, you can format your RAID array in NTFS and capture the whole stinkin' thing as one ginormous file.

Time is drawing near, can you feel the excitement, the anticipation?

Best regards,
Floyd

 

[randypj]

Wow.....thanks guys. I plumb forgot about it. Sun, Mon., Tues. 9-11 ET?
--Randy

 

[Lord Evermore]

I hadn't planned on expanding it to 640x480 during compression; that just seems totally anti-intelligent. But I can't record it any higher with the drivers that actually allow me to record, so I'm stuck with 320x240.

The WinTV+FM is the one I'm being forced to use. The TV Wonder was able to expand to 640X480 and could in fact capture video to my drive at that resolution, but without audio, it's useless, and nothing I did could get the audio to work.

Given that the WinTV and the TV Wonder both use the same chipset, I can only conclude that it's due to the TV Wonder drivers. ATI only has Video For Windows drivers, and they've got weird requirements for getting updated Win9x software, even though Win2k versions are downloadable. The WinTV's VFW drivers also didn't work, wouldn't let me start a capture, but its Windows Driver Model drivers worked fine.

Some other software may be useful to me, so I would like AVI_IO. The only actual remaining problem is the size of the file or the use of multisegments, which I could probably force VirtualDub to do, but the whole point of the RAID array was to avoid having to use my single IBM drive and risk losing frames.

 

[Floyd]

> &quot;Given that the WinTV and the TV Wonder both use the same chipset, I can only conclude that it's due to the TV Wonder drivers. ATI only has Video For Windows drivers, and they've got weird requirements for getting updated Win9x software, even though Win2k versions are downloadable.&quot; <

Hmm...I'll have to check my ATI drivers in Win98 when I reboot. I'm pretty sure they are WDM architecture. Of course I'm dealing with an AIW and yours is a TV Wonder, but it would be strange for them to not release WDM drivers for both since they are similar products, at least I think they are very similar...does the TV Wonder show a Rage Theater chipset in Device Manager?

With regard to not being able to download updates, that only deals with ATI's Multimedia Center (because it contains third-party software). The standard driver set will include any drivers necessary for video capture.

> &quot;Some other software may be useful to me, so I would like AVI_IO.&quot; <

YGM

> &quot;... but the whole point of the RAID array was to avoid having to use my single IBM drive and risk losing frames.&quot; <

Well, the problem of dropping frames due to poor HD performance is pretty much a moot point these days. I've captured full framerate 640x480 (compressed losslessly with HuffYUV) to a Quantum LCT 4400rpm drive. So if you needed to capture some of your video to the IBM, it shouldn't be a problem.

Best regards,
Floyd

 

[Lord Evermore]

The TV Wonder and the WinTV both use the Brooktree 8789 chipset. They seem to even use the same tuner, as the TV Wonder has a small part covered with metal tape which I can feel an opening behind, and on the WinTV that space has an extra coax connector for the FM Radio antenna (supplied with the card).

ATI also doesn't even provide drivers for the TV Wonder on their web site, only the new software. The Win2k and WinME. Win9x software has to be registered for and wait for it to come on CD. I already have version 2.0 of the software, and the site makes it seem like that's what will be delivered. At the top of the page for downloading software for the TV Wonder, it mentions that you should use the 'special' software that comes with the TV Wonder.

 

[Lord Evermore]

Well, this whole thing just shows that video capture is still not good enough for the masses, at least not for full movies.

I got AVI_IO, and it works great. The difference from VirtualDub in recording is minor, but it makes a big difference. VirtualDub as I've found won't make multi-segment AVI's on a single drive, only if you make the first segment on a different drive. AVI_IO does it right. It creates a bunch of basic AVI files with just header information, so that it does not have to take the time to create those files during the capture, which reduces frame drops. It seems to work very well. I got about 10 minutes of HuffYUV video in a 2 gig file plus another 200MB segment.

I'll use VirtualDub for the conversion to DiVX, which works fine with the segments created by AVI_IO. I was able to encode at about 28 to 30 frames per second with the highest bitrates and quality. Now I need to play with those settings to find what the best will be. I want a good quality video, but it needs to be compressed pretty highly to avoid a huge file size. The 2.2GB for 10 minutes was only reduced to 129MB, which is pretty awesome really considering I couldn't tell the difference in quality, but that would still create something like a 1.5GB file for the 2 hours per night. I wouldn't mind that, but if I wanted to make copies on CD or for people to download, that's a total of 4.5GB for a 6 hour movie.

So, anybody have any ideas on what the best bit-rate and other stuff should be? Also, should I use low-motion DiVX or high-motion? What's the difference? The video in Dune is probably going to have a lot of action scenes along with slow moving scenes inside buildings and stuff, and I don't want to have a lot of streaking or anything when there's a lot of action.

 

[Sohcan]

I still find that strange that you can't get audio with the TV Wonder...I'm using my friend's TV Wonder VE, Win98SE, and the out-of-the-box drivers, and I can capture audio. I typically have to open up the ATi TV software first to set the channel, close it, then open up VirtualDub. But as long as you have another option you should be fine.

I've found that the low-motion codec produces a much sharper picture than the high-motion codec, at least at 320x240. Low-motion tends to get a little jerky when an entire shot pans to the left or right, but it still produces a smooth picture when a smaller element (a person, ship, whatever) moves quickly across the shot. At high-bit rates, I've found that even 320x240 videos using the low-motion codec can look very close to VHS quality, despite being 1/4 the resolution. Try testing it out to see which one suits your preferences.

I'll probably be capturing Dune at 320x240, 6mbit low-motion DivX, and 22khz,16-bit stereo PCM audio (VirtualDub crashes for some reason if I try to do real-time MP3 compression, so I compress the audio afterwards), which is about 1GB/hour (Afterwards, I'll be shrinking it to ~650/2 hours). If for some reason your capture doesn't work, I can send you the source videos.

 

[Lord Evermore]

The straight uncompressed capture I'm sure will work alright, and at the compression rate I'm getting it shouldn't take much more than the original two hours to compress the whole episode. But I'm trying to figure out how much compression to use, what bitrate and codec, to get the best video but still a small size. I think I may make two versions, one to fit two hours onto CD, and one to get the absolute best quality I can with DiVX that I can concatenate all three episodes into one, remove the commercials and the extra credits between episodes, so I have one complete movie file, and the CD's would be each episode per CD with the credits and everything.

If I first compressed it at a high bitrate and then wanted to go lower in order to make the CD version, how much quality loss will there be from the recompression. Enough to make it worth making both compressed versions using the original uncompressed as the source?

 

[Floyd]

> &quot;So, anybody have any ideas on what the best bit-rate and other stuff should be?&quot; <

What I'm planning to do is cut out the commercials and then use a bitrate calculator to determine the maximum bitrate I can use to fit each part of the series onto a CD.

> &quot;Also, should I use low-motion DiVX or high-motion?&quot; <

If you're doing a conventional compression, the low-motion will yield the best overall results. But there will be a lot of blockiness in high motion areas.

> &quot;What's the difference?&quot; <

Both codecs are variable bitrate to some degree, but the low-motion codec more closely maintains the requested bitrate independent of onscreen action. The fast-motion codec will drop to a very low bitrate during low motion sequences and during lots of motion may actually exceed the requested bitrate. Ideally, you can use something like ProjectDivx, AviRevolution, or CompressAVI to merge high- and low-motion clips to get the best of both worlds. But of course that first requires creating full high- and low-motion clips, and time is precious in this case.

I'll be using an adaptive algorithm called Lotus m4c to analyze the video and insert keyframes where necessary (rather than at fixed intervals). The primary issue, however, is that predicting the final file size is next to impossible. It's going to be a mad dash to get it successfully compressed before the next part airs...

 

[ERJ]

I will also be trying to capture it. I have a DC10+ (mjpeg) which I will be using. I have been having problems with the multi-segment capture also, but not the same problem. I have no problem capturing multiple segments to a single drive but when it spills from one drive to the next it blue screens on me. Hopefully I will have the issue resolved by tonight (I think it has something to do with the max size needed to start a new file). Then it will be a &quot;mad dash&quot; to compress it and free up the hard drive space before tomorrow night.

ERJ

 

[Lord Evermore]

Not too bad a mad dash really, unless you're doing some serious work with the files. At 30fps average compression rate, it would take less than 2 hours to compress the episode (especially since there will be a good 20 minutes to half an hour of commercials to remove). Unless the calculations you're going to be doing take a very long time before the compression starts, it wouldn't be a big deal to start it at 11PM after the movie is over and do any cleanup work the next morning or in the evening before the next episode. And SciFi is showing each episode three times back to back, so you actually have a full 24 hours between each episode. (9PM-11PM 1st episode, 11PM-1AM 2nd, 1AM-3AM 3rd)

So high-motion might be best for the best quality? I don't mind having a rather large file for my own use, the one that I'll be combining into one big file for playback on my own system. I assume that the high motion codec just makes a bigger file by adding more keyframes? If that's the case, then I'll compress my own with the high motion codec, and then when I make the CD version I'll use the low-motion codec, if there will be considerable size differences (assuming the same bitrate).

It will be interesting when we're all through to compare the different captures we get, see which ones turned out best. I think I'll make a few sample videos from the final cuts, like 5 minutes in a low motion scene, plus 5 minutes in a high motion action scene, and then if everybody else does it, we can compare each others' quality.

 

[Floyd]

> &quot;Not too bad a mad dash really, unless you're doing some serious work with the files. At 30fps average compression rate, it would take less than 2 hours to compress the episode (especially since there will be a good 20 minutes to half an hour of commercials to remove).&quot; <

Well, my Celeron 566 &amp; 850 will compress at about 18fps when using mpg2avi, but the better quality process only runs at about 8-9fps. Removing the commercials will take a bit of time, and if I muck up the file size (poor approximation), I'll have to hurry up and re-encode a second time.

> &quot;So high-motion might be best for the best quality?&quot; <

Most definitely no, it will look very poor during static sequences no matter how much bitrate you throw at it (because it won't actually use the requested bitrate). The low-motion codec can yield good results on both static and dynamic scenes provided you keep the bitrate high, around 1500kbps is a good starting point.

> &quot;It will be interesting when we're all through to compare the different captures we get, see which ones turned out best.&quot; <

Is that a challenge? I'm up to it.

Best regards,
Floyd

 

[Sohcan]

Here's a sample of what the low-motion can do during high-motion scenes (albeit at 320x240)...it still performs really well IMHO, and still looks good full-screen if you sit back a bit. This particular clip was done at 6mbit/sec, resulting in 600MB for the 95 minute movie.

B5 low-motion sample

 

[Lord Evermore]

While I was out buying a VCR (we have two but they aren't mine and I wanted to make sure I had a new good one), I let my system record about two hours of TV, a couple of football games. With the HuffYUV compression during the record, it came to about 18 gigs. The quality looked pretty good, so I'll probably use that rather than uncompressed.

I tried converting it to high motion DiVX, and it did the same thing that my first attempt did, the audio and video were way out of sync (the audio went much slower than the video; using DiVX audio). Since I don't have much more time to play around with it, and since it seems low-motion will be better anyway and I know the audio works right, I'll use that codec, with a 6000kbps bitrate for my 'perfect' copy and then do some test runs to reduce the bitrate to get a good size for use on a CD.

Really though, this all just seems like a reaason for me to go buy more hard drive space so I can store pure uncompressed copies and not have to rush to get them compressed before the next episode (I'm actually like 5 gigs short on being able to do that with HuffYUV compression without worrying that I'll not have enough space to manipulate them, although I could just store them on CD afterwards).

After this is done, I'm going to have hard drive space to spare, and absolutely nothing to do with it.

 

[Floyd]

Lord Evermore, if you're just on the brink of having enough HD space, hit escape while AVI_IO is capturing to zap out the commercials. It will pop up a box that says &quot;Continue Capturing&quot;, then hit yes when the program returns. That should be enough to carry you over the top.

[edit] Umm...one very important detail I forgot. Be sure to enable resumed captures in the Capture Settings dialog. [/edit]

Just noticed I need to extend a warm thank you to the a-hole who rated me a 1 in my profile.

Best regards,
Floyd

 

[ERJ]

Yahooo....part 1 will be done encoding in an hour. Then I will have to see if everything was successful last night. Came out to about 1:30 after removing commercials. Encoding it at 910kb divx with 128kb mp3 audio, 640x380 (cropped out the bottom and top black bars). Final file size should be about 690mb, just right for my 700mb CD's.

ERJ

 

[ERJ]

Another question.

I am all up for comparing quality with everyone else here. Where would be the best place to host something like this (not the whole movie, just maybe a 5mb clip of it for quality comparison)? How much space do places like geocities give you to work with?

Thanks,

ERJ

 

[randypj]

<< Just noticed I need to extend a warm thank you to the a-hole who rated me a 1 in my profile. >>



Floyd, I thought 1 was good when I was giving it to ya. OK, I just rated you 11.....er, um, maybe not....maybe that was a 1 also.
--Randy











j/k............I just gave ya a 10