Hi there,

I use a Booktree 878-based TV card to capture TV programs to my HDD. Thus far, my format of choice is Motion JPEG (MJPEG), captured as AVI with a 48k/16bit stereo stream for further VCD compatibility. MJPEG gives me the freedom of easy editing, along with decent quality serving as a good template for MPEG-1 VCD encoding.

I tried Cyberlink's Power VCR II but the MPEG quality at the HQ setting is way off from what standalone encoders can achieve (I prefer quality over speed, btw).

The Tsumani MPG Encoder 2.513 as well as the Cinemacraft Encoder 2.50 refuse to load this MJPEG video so my question is if there is any tool capable of wrapping MJPEG into some project file that can be accessed by either TMPGEnc or CCE (like VFAPI can wrap DVD video into AVI).

Any suggestions ?

How about using Avisynth for frameserving?

A simple .avs script containing the following line should do the trick.



The .avs file can be opened with TMPGEnc or pretty much any video software you prefer.

If you looking for complete compliant vcds, you should also resample your audio to 44,1 kHz: ResampleAudio(44100) (I don't know about quality. Maybe you should try to use ssrc for resampling.)

if you prefer quality then why are you capturing with mjpeg? You should be capturing with huffyuv, which is lossless and still decent compression size.

Maybe you can't understand that some of the people don't have enough hd space or their hd isn't fast enough. Using mjpeg at high quality (not the default settings) gives quality comparable to Huffyuv with better compression ratio (something like 10 - 15 : 1)

I can understand that just fine. I can also understand that humongous fast HDs are dirt cheap now and this is no reason. You love mjpeg, fine. I like as few artifacts as possible with data for the codec as good as possible so the codec can do its best job. Impossible with mjpeg.

I like using MJPEG even though I have a good amount of hd space for capturing, (120GB+80GB). With the PicVideo codec a setting of q19 or maybe q18 give a decent picture with very few artifacts. After capturing I normally do a good deal of filtering that takes out the noise and any MJPEG artifacts I notice.
Back when I only had 30GB for caping I had only used Huffyuv and now when I have more hd space I use lossy MJPEG.
Prehaps I just like having almost 24hr of captured content...

and some of us capture straight to 8Mbps mpeg-2 and burn straight to DVD *shrug*

<edit> ok, so I edit out commercials first. mmm, wintv pvr-250. mmm, beyondtv. mmm, mpeg-vcr.

Fasy hfs are cheap nowadays but my udma 100 hd doesn't help me because my main board only supports udma 33.

I'd be very surprised if it was held back at all by your controller, at least in any meaningful way. The beginning portion of the drive might be capable of exceeding 33MB/s in sequential transfers, but it drops pretty fast to probably below 20MB/s at the end. Spindle speeds and data density have moved a bit past udma33 now, yeah, but they're still no threat to ata66. The fact that controllers can handle peak speeds of 133MB/s, and even 150MB/s with SATA, doesn't mean that HDs can even come anywhere close to that. The absolute fastest SATA drive you can get today doesn't even use up ata66's bandwidth, nevermind its native 150MB/s theoretical controller limit. Go to www.storagereview.com and see if your drive is on there, and check out the sequential transfer rates for it. You'll probably feel a little better about it after seeing what it actually does.