Internal TV card help please!

[phillai]

Can anyone help me?

I got a Leadtek WinFast TV2000 XP Expert TV card for xmas from my girlfriend and I'm trying to optimise it so that I can record The Office xmas specials on the 26th and 27th.

1. It mentions in the manual that I can use MPEG4 codec. Where can I get this codec from? I'm sure that it's the best one for my TV card and I'm sure that I've already got it but I'm not 100% sure.
Just what is the best video codec out there?

2. What's the best sound output when I record video onto my hard drive? I've got 3 options here that really apply to me.
Stereo Mix
Mono Mix
Aux
I also hear that it's best to record using mono mix as there really is no point having stereo as it takes up too much space. I'll only be using my TV card to record occasional programmes.

3. Are there any other things you can recommend me doing to getting a better picture? I hear that dScaler is good?

4. Who else has my TV card? I can't get the remote to work at all.

Other than these minor things the WinFast TV2000 XP Expert is a great TV card.

Thanks to all replies in advance!

[Lyris]

1. It mentions in the manual that I can use MPEG4 codec. Where can I get this codec from? I'm sure that it's the best one for my TV card and I'm sure that I've already got it but I'm not 100% sure.
Just what is the best video codec out there?

It depends just what you mean by 'best' - HuffyUV [search Google] is an awesome, very fast codec that captures lossless video, but of course with a very large filesize. I found XViD (an MPEG4 codec) to be quite good for on the fly capturing with reasonable sizes.

2. What's the best sound output when I record video onto my hard drive? I've got 3 options here that really apply to me.
Stereo Mix
Mono Mix
Aux
I also hear that it's best to record using mono mix as there really is no point having stereo as it takes up too much space. I'll only be using my TV card to record occasional programmes.

That all depends on the program. Cheaper TV cards will only be able to pull mono sound from the antenna. I don't use any sound functions on my TV card, I use my sound card's line in for that.

3. Are there any other things you can recommend me doing to getting a better picture? I hear that dScaler is good?

TV pictures are interlaced so yeah, DScaler will deinterlace everything and record. Thing is, it's intended more for watching TV rather than recording - last time I checked, it could only record at half vertical resolution which kinda kicks the whole good quality idea right in the nads. Even if you don't care about quality it's a bit of a bitch because the videos are therefore squashed and need to be stretched back. As well as that when I tried to record even quite small resolution video clips on my 2.8ghz Pentium 4 with 1gb of RAM, it still dropped frames! Instead I use a program called iuVCR which I use to capture full, interlaced 720x576 frames without any dropping whatsoever.

Recording straight from TV, then having a perfect file seems like an impossible dream TV card manufacturers use to sell you a card, I find that very rarely this is true - 1-touch file creation is a bit hard. I have to capture, deinterlace (unless I'm writing back to DVD for watching on TV), change the length of the sound to keep the audio in sync with the picture, and then reencode (all this with Virtualdub, freeware program). I don't think DScaler however suffers from the out of sync problem.

Short answer: If you can use it to capture full resolution, DScaler is your best choice.

4. Who else has my TV card? I can't get the remote to work at all.

No clue, sorry

[Lyris]

I did a tutorial about this for my site:

http://lyris.landofwhimsy.com/features_tvrip.html

[?pint]

I have some WinTV 2000 card for my PC. It's cack. It won't accept NTSC signal ft:. But it's the old smelly version, only Novatech didn't say so when I bought my PC. Likewise with them saying I had s-video in on my Graphics card... *sigh*.

Otherwise, the WinTV cards are probably the best TV cards you can get. They're the only brand I've seen in more than one place, so surely that counts for something... .

At the moment, I'm just using Windows Movie Maker to capture my stuff, as high quality isn't necessary at the moment because I'm just ripping game videos for the Interweb (like my Amplitude one). Otherwise I use... NanoDVR? That's the one recommended for it, I believe.

[Lyris]

Whether or not the card accepts an NTSC signal is based on the drivers (unless we're talking about the antenna input). Take a look at my tutorial link and try iuVCR, I'll bet that'll solve your problem. Dscaler (www.dscaler.org) doesn't even use VFW drivers so will definitely accept NTSC, and even PAL60.

As for the cards, most of them are based on the BT878 chipset and underneath are mostly the same. I think you pay mostly for bundled software.

[phillai]

Thanks for all the replies guys.

Also as regards to my sound problem...
I'm using the onboard sound from my ASUS NFORCE 2 mobo.

Just a quick question, is there a best codec for watching and one for recording?
I'm really interested in recording the best picture possible at the highest resolutions at the lowest file sizes...

Sorry for sounding like a newbie but TV cards are all new to me!

[Lyris]

Well, DivX on my old system was OK for recording but occasionally the whole thing scrambled up for a few seconds, probably something to do with hard disk access speed. You could try using that at a high bit rate and see how it comes out.

Keep in mind that the audio will also take up space, although not as much, and it is probably recording in uncompressed PCM by default.