Capture

[learning more]

Hello, I have a question about Video.
Do you know of any GOOD video capture programs?
I would prefer a freeware, I have a couple of paid for ones that suck.
The best I've found so far to use is "windows moviemakerII". And as we all know M$ stuff hogs cpu and is very slow. like it takes about 500 min and puts it into a format of "wmv".
Any help would be great.

Have a GREAT Day.

[dap OLD werewolf]

Well the best you found so far to use (MovieMakerII) is rubbish in my book...lol

First of all you said "capture" but I would need to know what your purpose or goal is. Do you want to capture and also encode to a format which is small enough to share? If so, capturing is just the beginning - there are apps which are all-in-one capture/encode but I am someone who only investigates how to do things at high quality, and that isn't the best way to go about it. All I can tell you is what I would suggest, and it's not definitive because there are many factors involved.

First, capturing. Unfortunately what program to use can be difficult. Your capture card should have come with some sort of app to do this with. If you want the best quality possible, you should capture the video using a lossless codec like Huffy, so you have little compression. So what you want is a program that is able to capture at high resolution. What program? It's hard to say as different capture cards like some software better than others due to the YUV, some cards work better with different codecs, etc. So hopefully you do have an application that came with your card, and I would try the actual capture with that app. If you do, however, capture with a lossless codec like Huffy or the mjpg codec, a standard length movie could require you to have about 40-60 gigabytes of hard drive space if you want to capture the whole movie at once. You can also try using VirtualDub for your capture, it also allows you to capture the file in bits and then put the bits together during the encoding process. Whether or not VirtualDub will work well for you most likely depends on whether your capture card likes it or not: http://virtualdub.sourceforge.net/

After you have captured the video, then you can reencode it (compress it) to, i.e. avi. I recommend using VirtualDub to do this if you are looking for a freeware application, and even if you weren't, VDub is quite excellent.

Capturing and encoding video is not the easiest of tasks and it is difficult to explain the entire process in detail on a forum like this. You said that your "capture" took 500 minutes and depending on what the cpu and ram are on your computer, it's not an outrageous length of time if you are capturing AND encoding a standard length movie at good quality.

You can find guides on capturing and encoding video on these sites:
http://www.dvdrhelp.com
http://www.doom9.org/

[learning more]

Thank you Dap!
My sys= 1800cpu, 512, XP Pro, Gf4,60G,30G,...ect
Capture= USBLive new edtion, not a card it's a cable. Program with it sucks and yes anything by M$ also sucks. And when I said 500m thats after trying to put back on to a cd the capture takes as long as you let it record from the source. I'm trying to put home movies on to cd as in "digital" from a vcr. Sometimes I use moviemakerII to shorten when all the TMPGEnc and virDub just confuses me and I get frustrated and let the mmII go for it while I'm gone to work. I know it's a shi__y way but it works.
I'll check out the sites and thank you again!!!