AusCelebs Forums

Thanks for the reply xencaps, ABC & SBS HD is fine for me too (1280 x 720). Yeah, for $250 you can get a 24" Full HD LCD. Is there a tool to convert the my recordings to 1920x1080 without a loss quality? I tested re-encoding with SUPER © and it seems ok but don't want to have to re-encode every recording I take.

It is how the stations compress the signal. Compare any low bit rate Aussie Cap to US HD .. skinny much, regardless of BMP & max settings on kick ass systems.
We can only start with what they transmit.

Sydney

ABCHD was the first to have correct aspect ratio ( when they went from the similar to ch7) 576 x 720 duplex signal to 720 x 1280
(note SBS uses this but only if the show is compatable so it varies ) The original high bit rate 1080 x 1440 ABC was first rate ..but screwed up when ABC2 started (2005)

Ten was next in having correct aspect ratio HD mid/late 07, 1080 x 1920 right up to mid march 2009 when they went back to the 1080 x 1440

During 08 Seven started before Nine , but they both stopped when Go & 7two were launched & went back to the current 1080 x 1440

I was amazed by a mate on the Gold Coast as all his stations capped without conversion, so he said .. but i think he just had his PWR DVD set up right haha.

XnView or irFanView , i use Xn mostly. Some versions of Photoshop have in built batch converter, if you have that.

Thanks for the info 8. Damn Americans have way better capture cards then us like the DViCO Fusion HDTV7
Dual Express.

I have recently got a HD STB which records to .TS files, which I have found good programs to work with, but, I'm getting SO pissed off with the different quality signals from the networks!
Especially the nine network, and especially during Hey Hey, bulk of the show is ok, but when they cut to a live music act it suddenly changes to a lot of blocky compression!
I'm sure the bastards are doing it on purpose because most of the show is ok, just the music acts are stuffed up!

I got myself a new pc over the weekend, i thought i was only going to be able to do caps the long way (dvd recorder > cap from powerdvd > post on auscelebs) as i normally do with the morning tv programs (totally wild, toasted tv, kids wb etc). Ran my digital tv cap card setup to see if it would fail, as i had read that it had failed for many others running Windows 7.

It worked for me first go, the best thing is that previously i couldn't multitask (ie: produce caps, while watching/recording live tv) without the program crashing. I gather it is due to me having more RAM, but it no longer crashes while i've got multiple windows open.

I hope these posts are an indication you've sorted out all of your technical gremlins, Xfactor?

Not entirely, these were from my dvd recorder - then through powerdvd on pc (similar to how i produce the caps for Kell on toasted tv + puzzle play). It's a long story, i havn't got it entirely sorted out yet! But basically what has held me up is due to being on Windows 7 on a new pc, quickly found out that the powerdvd software it was bundled with was dodgy (have since found that it's not Windows 7 (64bit) friendly). As was my standard version of Photoshop (granted it was 8 years old, so i do understand why it wouldn't work).

When i cap from my capture card on pc, then try to play it back on powerdvd... it freezes at any point of the playback (might be 10 - 30 seconds, sometimes minutes if i am lucky), even then when i was able to cap successfully... they would come out with various lines through them. Have tried fiddling around with the deinterlace settings, the caps i've done in Amanda's thread, Kath Robinson are about the best i can make them. Funnily enough the way i corrected it to get near enough, was enabling hardware acceleration mode in powerdvd. However it makes picking out the perfect cap even harder, as the video playback jumps around similar to bad tracking on old vhs tapes. Something i will have to get used to, but it is funny in a way - my old setup the picture quality was not that great in the capture card recording program.... yet running the video through powerdvd made the video play back and thus the caps much better than they would be if processed with the original capture card software.

I am also alternating between an older monitor + one new lcd screen, so there are some graphical differences. I see more artifacts on the older monitor, than i do on the lcd.... which is odd as i thought it would be the reverse (especially if i was viewing SD caps).

I am on the hunt for a windows 7 compatible hdtv capture card, that isn't Windows Media Center reliant, which i can make
I am still recording shows on my computer, whether i can successfully get caps from them like i used to (same quality, but i also know something is better than nothing), is another thing altogether.

In the mean time i have a huge backlog of recorded dvds to process caps from

The move from XP to Win7 was also difficult for my old Winfast setup. In the end I chucked the Winfast card out and got a Hauppauge HVR-2200 tuner card which I run under Windows Media Centre. This setup is quite stable on Win7 64bit.

I actually tried WMC with the winfast card not long after i discovered my issues, what turned me off it was that it wasn't an easy process to extract caps from the recordings. I was going to to try some other dtv programs i had that were installed on my xp machine (back when i first had trouble with the winfast card when i got it back in late august i was trying EVERY piece of software other than what it came with), need to remember what they actually are called to try and test them out.

I was initially going to just run both my old computer and my new one side by side, would have been a nightmare be it switching cables around each time i wanted to switch to the computer i was using + the electricity bill would sky rocket. Then my old computer started having hard drive issues preventing me from running the computers side by side (bloody odd considering, i've changed them around a few times since initially buying the computer 6 years ago - the hard drive that failed was less than 2 years old). I still havn't gotten around to fixing it yet, too much fiddle farting around.

My other option was to format my new computer's hdd, ditch Windows 7 and install XP, but then i'd be hampering it for use in the next few years (it's a super computer compared to my old one - more ram than XP can recognise!). Or alternatively install XP on another hdd, and create a dual boot system.


But yeah, i will look into your cap card suggestion, the computer shops near me have little selection. Have been to JB Hifi and Dick Smith, they have no name brands or other shops have pointed me in the direction of DVD-HDD recorders. I'll do some further research and order it on the internet.

You can get the Hauppauge cards from Umart in Mt Waverley.

There are a couple of steps you have to go through to get the mpeg files out of media Centre, which is why i'm usually a week behind on my capping, I do the conversion process each sunday night then pick through the files over the next week. I have found media centre to be the easiest way to maintain my recording schedule though.