Recently I decided to save disk space by archiving recorded TV to DVDs and of course some of the files were too big to fit on a standard 4.3GB DVD, so I needed to compress the files. I also thought that it would be a good idea to copy some old VCRs to DVDs so that they could be viewed more easily. So I had to find suitable codecs and software to capture analogue recordings, compress videos and trim them to size. This all proved tricky to get right so I thought I would document what I found.
So first I had to find a codec to compress the Recorded TV from the DVR-MS files and I soon settled on the free Xvid MPEG4 compressor from http://www.xvid.org. But then I had trouble converting from MPEG2 and found various issues with timing, audio sync, picture chopping, etc. The standard Microsoft MPEG2 codec didn’t work and neither did FFDShow, Nvidia or an old version of CyberLink; the only codec I found to work was CyberLink PowerDVD 8.0.1918. I tested this out with GraphEdit and then found the free Prism conversion software at http://www.nchsoftware.com/prism but unfortunately the video is speeded up with Prism and I haven’t been able to get that working yet. The standard Xvid compression worked well compressing to 40% of the original with little loss of quality. On one file I set the compression index to 6 and achieved a 35% compression. The compression took some time; about twice as long as the actual recording.
So next I looked into VCR capture. I have a Dvico Digital TV Card and this has an analogue input so I tried this. I eventually managed to get GraphEdit working but needed to use the “Smart Tee” to view while capturing and then I found the opensource VirtualDub software. I found problems getting the audio to sync using this but found that a modified version “VirtualDub VCR+Sync” worked OK (see http://www.virtualdub.net/download.htm). I again used the Xvid codec for compression and found that it was necessary to set the usage to “real time”. I also found the sound was messed up with the MPEG Layer3 audio compressor, so I used PCM and that worked fine. I then wanted to split the video recordings into separate episodes and found that VitualDub could achieve this but I found the freeware AVITrimmer easier to use (see http://www.solveigmm.com/?Products&p=AVITrimmer).
The other thing about capturing from the VCR was that performance constraints made it impractical to view on the PC and so I rigged up the UHF output of the VCR to a TV.
So now I am happy that I have all the software and codecs to achieve video capture and compression but was surprised how difficult it was to find the right combination of tools.