VCR to Mpg?

Spunj

Anybody know what tools/equipment I need to transfer files from a video tape to my PC and make them into Mpg/Mpeg files?
I have an old Decoder card I got with a Creative DVD player lying in a box, but I am not sure if it has external video in on it... I also have an ancient copy of Director somewhere, I know it has something to do with movie clips but I never spent much time on it.

Do I have enough to get started or am I going in the wrong direction altogether?

- Spunj

Inspector Gadget

It'll look terrible - VHS has half the vertical and horizontal resolution of TV, leaving the max. resolution at about 360x240 (I think), and is quite noisy even at that, and then when you try to compress that video stream using MPEG, which will lose further detail (by it's very nature, it's a lossy codec - it has to be) you'll end up with something practically unwatchable.

Add additional noise for a worn tape, or something that's been taped on a home deck rather than a professional one, or (heavens forbid) long play, and all that, and allowing for additional noise (especially false colour data) in the A->D stage in the video in circuitry (inevitable as the picture has to be 'reconstructed' from colour and timing information) you're looking at total trash.

Also, maybe someone else can answer this - do VCRs employ Macrovision on their outputs? If that's the case, the news is even worse.

Gadget

Gerry

I think most vcr's have macrovision on the outputs, to stop the old stacking vcr's and copying tapes trick.

I agree that quality would be pretty bad, but I'd say if you have the stream uncompressed on your hard drive, you can try various mpeg encoding settings and you may end up with something reasonable.

Spunj

Thanks for the replies lads...
The video (I believe) is near TV quality (done by pro equipment and one piece of it was even used on a TV advert) and I want to take it and stick it on a website, so I would be reducing quality a good bit in favour of size anyways. If I decide to give it a go, do you think I have the necessary Hardware/Software there to do it or do I need to get something else?

- Spunj

Inspector Gadget

Well, the best-case scenario is S-Video out (VCR) to composite video in (PC) and keeping the audio seperate - whatever you do, don't go through the RF out as your signal will be degraded by the VCR's modulator and the PC's tuner.

If you record the image at the resolution of the video (quarter-frame rather than full frame) you can practically eliminate the effects of Macrovision - since your video'll have to be small for a web site, this is essential anyway.

Capture it uncompressed (AVI or something like that) - it'll need lots of HDD space (320x240x25 frames/sec = ~5.5MB/sec)and then, as Gerry says, experiment with codecs and settings; you may find that DivX (in its various flavours - go to divx.com for an ad-sponsored otherwise-free encoder) could provide better compression with more quality than MPEG-1. MPEG-2 is pointless as the frame size isn't big enough to benefit from MPEG-2's enhancements over its little brother. Try TMPGEnc for the MPEG encoding (free for MPEG-1 stuff, MPEG-2 = 30 day trial).

If you find you don't have tools for video editing, there's a pretty good free one called Virtualdub (add ".org" for the address of the web site).

Have fun...
Gadget