Looking for a DVD capture programme..

September 10, 2006 12:13 PM

Does anyone know a decent real-time MPEG-2 capture program for the PC? One that produces high-quality output (as good as a standard DVD recorder), produces DVD compliant MPEG2 files, and is preferably free (or cheap).

I've tried a few - ASUS Digital VCR and InterVideo WinDVR 3 - but they haven't really been up to scratch. Thanks in advance.

posted by ascullion to computers & internet (2 comments total)

What are you capturing with?

You may have better results capturing in high quality to a non-MPEG2 format (MJPEG), then doing a slow, non-realtime multi-pass conversion to MPEG2...

Alternatively capture cards with hardware mpeg2 encoders (such as hauppauge's PVR- series) can generate realtime DVD compliant MPEG2 files with next-to-no CPU usage
posted by nielm at 3:00 PM on September 10, 2006

Well, to be perfectly correct nothing of quality will be realtime, since you need to lag back a couple of frames so you can get all the bidirectional predictive stuff in place. (This is partially why it's a pain in the ass to edit MPEG-2).

Have you tried VideoLAN? It ain't bad, and is really really flexible. I just took a minute and got it to convert arbitrary files to MPEG-2 video, AC3 audio. What it sounds like you'd want to do is:

1) Install VLC
2) File, Open Capture Device.
3) Select your Capture Device
4) Check off Stream/Save, and click Settings
5) Check off File, and declare a location
6) Check off MPEG-TS or MPEG-PS; I actually don't know off the top of my head which you'll need.
7) Check Video Codec, and set to mp2v. Optionally, increase video bitrate
8) Check Audio Codec, and set to a52
9) Click OK on the child dialog, OK on the main dialog, and hit play. See what happens?
posted by effugas at 5:06 PM on September 10, 2006