Video encoding/compression

[Jublian]

Here's the deal - I've been capturing tv with an ATi TV-Wonder, which encodes to mpeg-2.
I've been experimenting with a trial version of Flask, but I was wondering if anyone could give me some advice or point me in the right direction. I'd like to know the characteristics of the various codecs and what settings I should use to give the best quality-size ratio, or just best quality or even which settings I should tweak to be able to choose how much compression I want to use...

Thanks

 

[Jublian]

I know that someone knows... it's gotta be an easy question - please?

 

[DAPUNISHER]

This will have what your looking for Link

 

[Duvie]

Watch out...Go to www.doom9.net to get files and read guides...Tom doesn't quite now what he is doing or saying (like what else is new)...xmpeg (flaskmpegs new version that except the divx 4.0 codec) is still rather buggy with multiple bugs that cause crashes and freezes...

Look into other programs at doom9.net....


You can capture straight to divx codec out of ati tv wonder...Unfortunately it doesn't let you set the bitrate so it defaults to like 600kbits/sec, which is rather poor. I don't know a way around this but it seems like a simple change maybe in the codec file. Beyond me though.

 

[Jublian]

Alright, I've looked over those two links.. confusing and complicated for now - I just need to read them more thoroughly! Thanks!
Another question that's kinda related -> I can't seem to play mpeg-2 files with Windows Media player.. I can only open them with Flask and then I can only hear sound once I've converted them to some other format. I'm pretty sure I've got all the necessary codecs.

Thanks for the help