Hello!

I'm in a process of capturing old VCR tapes contents to a PC using a
tuner card and VLC. At first I produced MP2 files (an attempt to go
straight to MP4 encoded with H.264 resulted in high CPU usage and
dropped frames) and then started converting them to MP4 and coded with
H.264 to reduce files size. When I opened the resulting MP4 file with VLC
(2.0.10, under FC19+KDE on AMD Phenom X4, 2+ GHz with graphic card:
ATI FireGL V5600) I saw huge pixelation making the movie unviewable.
The average CPU usage on 4 cores was about 13%. Then I attempted to open
the same file with "totem" and "dragon player" - and there was no
pixelation (and CPU usage was slightly lower, about 8%).

Googling for this problem I saw many issues around 2010-2012 but nothing
recent. And the suggestions I've read (line changing the setting of
"Skip H.264 in-loop deblocking filter" from "none" to "all"
or altering the x264 profile from "high" to "baseline") didn't help.
The setting "Use GPU accelerated decoding" is "ON".

What can cause this behavior?
Did I forget some setting?

TIA for any ideas,
kaza.

and what is wrong with 2012?

just to clarify, has this worked before?


vlc is very powerful but, tbh, for me it's just too much.
a few years ago i managed to transcode a few dvd movies (raw video data, basically) into high quality compressed mp4's. i tried with vlc first, but quickly realized that i have to use some dedicated ripping app.
i think your best bet is to go a similar way: try to capture the data uncompressed, then transcode it to mp4 or sth else - some apps might even offer sane defaults for that.

still weird that it looks ok on totem, but not on vlc.
maybe during the capturing process you messed up some of vlc's settings?