Re: Best USB device for capturing video to AVI format

Ken: Thanks for all your info. I actually emailed Hauppauge and they
say the max. resolution of the WinTV USB2 is 640x480. My camcorder is
actually a Canon zr600, which has both analog and DV outputs. It would
have been nice to use a USB device on my laptop, but right now I'm
exploring the route of connecting to my desktop PC (Athlon 64 3200, I
GB RAM, 650 GB HD, Win XP SP2) directly via firewire. I've obtained an
inexpensive firewire card, so I'm going to try that tonight.

Richard: Thanks for your info as well. If things go well tonight I
will only have the option of capturing in DV, so I'll go from there.

Thanks.

Jon
On Jan 13, 1:08 pm, "Richard Crowley" <rcrow...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
<ntr...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote ...

I'm capturing analog video from a Panasonic camcorder that records
to tape. The Hauppauge device captures in raw AVI,

"raw AVI" is both undefined and unlikely.

First, AVI is a *container file* and not a format at all. An AVI file
will have a four-character code at the beginning which describes which
codec was used to encode the contents because presumably one would
need the same codec to DEcode the contents. There are several hundred
different codecs, mostly compressed (both lossless and lossy), and even
a few un-compressed codecs.

You can use a utility such ashttp://www.headbands.com/gspot/that
will peek into your AVI file and tell you which codec it was encoded
with, and also which codecs that are installed on your computer that
are used to decode it.

Video isn't "raw" after it has been stored in a file. It may be considered
"raw" as it streams live from the camera.  But "raw" video in a computer
file is just ones and zeroes and is indistinguishable from any other kind
of data unless it is identified somehow.  The four-character code at the
head of an AVI file is an example of an identified, file-based piece of
video data.  You can see a list of most of the four-character codes at
this website....http://www.fourcc.org/

It is not clear what Hauppage means when they say "raw", but it is
rather unlikely that it means completely uncompressed as that is a
very high data rate and will produce humongous video files. For
example a commonly used codec, DV-AVI is compressed 5:1
and still takea ~14 GB per hour. You can do the math and see
what "uncompressed" video would take.

which I would then edit and encode to DVD compliant MPEG,
burn to DVD and watch on my settop DVD player.

So why not just record to MPEG and leave it?

I simply want to find the most inexpensive hardware
to do this, while losing as little quality as possible. Thanks.

Most of the quality is likely lost either in the camera, or when the
video is encoded into MPEG.  It is not clear from the information
you have posted that you could get any higher quality than you
are getting now. Particularly if you are already recording "raw AVI"
(uindefined?)

.

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