Greetings, On Thursday 13 December 2001 22:49, you wrote: > On Thu, 2001-12-13 at 15:00, Billy Biggs wrote: > > Roger (roger.maillist@xxxxxxxxxxxx): > > > when i recorded from an old video tape (VHS) to preserve it > > > digitally, I noticed that my p3 2x750 dropped frames like crazy. [...] > > -- > > Billy Biggs > > vektor@xxxxxxxxxxxx > > bah! it doesn't matter. just for ref tho, xawtv. even with the lowest > settings of 16 bit color instead of 24/32 and @ 100x100 or so (i usually > record at 352x240 or so). lol. i think it's becuase the format is way > to detailed & in a vhs, there's probabely too many pixels to record. No, that's not the problem. If you are recording at 100x100 you are recording 10,000 pixels, no more. What you are probably suffering from is jitter and noise: the signal from a VCR is a lot less stable than the average broadcast, either analog or digital. So, instead of a nice and steady horizontal and vertical pulses, your TV card has to deal with badly defined pulse levels, and pulse widths/intervals that differ from one line to another. Most cards have a computerized PLL (Phased Locked Loop) that can't deal with this (TVs usually do better). You mention it's an old tape, which makes matters worse. You probably have 'drag' at the top of bottom of the image (a few skewed lines), which will almost certainly trash your vertical sync. > so the variance in quality of recording between a vhs tape & DSS/Cable > box is drastic. i think the quality of the vhs tape also has allot to > do with it because as a tape gets older, there tends to be more abnormal > colors on playback (greens, fuzz, etc)...also, maybe becuase it was > recorded by a unsteady hand using a one of those vhs cam > recorders(?)...as such, instead of people just moving, you get the whole > image canvas also moving becuase of the 'unsteady hand' when recording. Again, the problem lies not in the amount of change in the picture [*], but everything with a crappy handycam, and probably a low quality video8 to VHS tape-over (there aren't many VHS camcorders out there...). As for a solution: I don't think there's a lot you can do on the computer side... Cleaning the VCR, winding the tape back and forth once so it sits nicely on the reels might help. The trick is to get as stable (in electronic sense) a picture as possible. - Nemosoft [*] Ever tried recording a videoclip? I'm surprised those MPEG satellite encoders don't flip out on them more often :)
