Hi there!

I am having hard time encoding TV shows using my TV card. When specifying DivX as video encoder and MP3 (the FhG encoder which comes bundled with Windows) as audio encoder, the video and audio are of of synch. after a few minutes (20 seconds on an 120 minutes movie for example). Any idea how I could fix this?

By the way... I also tried installing the LAME ACM plugin, but without any success. Other audio and video encoders are not supported by my old Hauppauge recorder.

Regards,
Sebastian Mares

Have you tried remuxing the video/audio? It might help.
It could be possible that the out-of-sync issue is produced when capturing. In this case the only possible thing is to change the capturing program.

I will try remuxing the audio/video soon.

Anyways, I am not able to use any other software than Hauppauge's own WinTV 2000. Nero and all other tools I tried (VirtualDub, PowerVCR, WinDVR...) crash with the same error message when initializing the device.

Dropped frames can cause audio/video desynchronization, so you might want to check if you're getting too much (more than 0) of them. With plenty of dropped frames, the audio and video tracks will be of different length, and it might be a real pain trying to synchronize them.

If the problem is indeed dropped frames, you should reduce the CPU usage of the encoding process. Encoding into MPEG-4 (DivX) real-time requires a LOT of CPU power. Try capturing into a low-CPU overhead intermediate format (MJPEG or HuffYUV) and then re-encode into MPEG-4.

VirtualDub had some mods optimized for TV capturing (VirtualDub+VCR etc.), but obviously you can't use them You could examine incompatibility issue in further detail, VirtualDub (and mods) is really too good to be ignored for this kind of job.