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Old 09-11-2003, 04:37 PM   #1
niidea
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Registered: Jun 2003
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Poor VHS quality


I got a very bad image quality, a lot of noise, when watching VHS on my computer through a TV card. I am using :
- WinTV GO and the bttv driver simply through the command "modprobe bttv"
- mplayer with the command "mplayer -tv on:driver=v4l:input=1:width=640:height=480:norm=SECAM -fs"
Where is the problem ? How can I have a decent quality, like when watching VHS on my TV ?

Thanks.
 
Old 09-11-2003, 04:53 PM   #2
Mad Merlin
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Well, VHS is pretty poor quality to start with, and I suspect you may just be noticing it moreso on a monitor, because they are infintely clearer than a TV. You may also have to fiddle with some settings on the TV card, but I suspect the monitor vs TV issue is pretty important also.
 
Old 09-12-2003, 03:46 AM   #3
faheyd
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1. The WinTV-Go is the bottom of the barrel as far as TV cards go. Just getting a picture you can see, is really worth the $45 dollars that the card costs.
2. I'll assume you are using the coax cable connection from the VCR output to the TV card coax input and reading channel 3/4. Well, what can we say, the VCR is decoding the tape, vhs quality , and then, your 45 dollar TV card is encoding (probably MPEG-1) , to your computer montor, via overlay . A horrible thing.
So, even though you are seeing 'low' quality, it's a blessing you are seeing anything at all. I'm not talking down to ya either, as I have one of those wintv-go cards also.

But you can try some of the 'new' type of TV cards, or high end vid cards with TV capabilities built in. See http://www.linuxlogin.com/linux/wintv.php . Maybe the application you are using is not so 'good'. See http://tvtime.sourceforge.net/ specifically

I didn't know that the wintv did SECAM that well, anybody else 'have' hands-on experience to help with that???

Last edited by faheyd; 09-12-2003 at 03:48 AM.
 
Old 09-12-2003, 05:35 AM   #4
niidea
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Thanks for this explanations.
I'll try tvtime...
 
Old 09-16-2003, 12:01 PM   #5
vektor_sigma
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Let me know if you have any problems with tvtime, your settings for mplayer didn't look quite right, but tvtime should give you much better quality since it will capture at full resolution and colour quality.

-Billy, tvtime author
 
Old 09-16-2003, 12:33 PM   #6
codec
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Registered: Sep 2003
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yeah, tvtime is great.

I was trying to bring PAL60hz to the pc monitor with a aver203 and it didn't work. Right before I return it to shop, I did a test of DVD input with tvtime and the video is really good. Much better than aver203's windows software

Last edited by codec; 09-16-2003 at 12:35 PM.
 
Old 09-16-2003, 12:35 PM   #7
vektor_sigma
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tvtime should support PAL60 inputs just fine with the bttv9 driver (http://bytesex.org/bttv/) and tvtime 0.9.9 or 0.9.10.

Good luck, and thanks.
-Billy
 
Old 09-16-2003, 07:17 PM   #8
Electro
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TV tuner or capture cards do not encode in MPEG when previewing or displaying it. They use a color scheme like yuv. This gets drawn to the video cards memory to be displayed as an overlay object. If the capture card has MPEG encoding chip, it decreases the load of the CPU when you are writing to the disk using the MPEG format.

In tvtime just keep hitting n on the keyboard until you see a picture. This will change the modes that tvtime supports. When you close tvtime. It should save the settings that you put.
 
Old 09-16-2003, 07:26 PM   #9
vektor_sigma
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Quote:
Originally posted by Electro
In tvtime just keep hitting n on the keyboard until you see a picture. This will change the modes that tvtime supports. When you close tvtime. It should save the settings that you put.
tvtime does not work this way. We have a menu system for configuring the application. The "n" key is not bound to any function in our latest release.

-Billy, tvtime author
 
  


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