Can VS10 capture from Camcorder to DIVX format

[cswimm]

I know that I can capture in AVI, MPEG2, MPEG4, etc. and convert these to DIVX but I can't seem to capture directly to DIVX in real time. Is this possible?

I have noticed that a file captured in AVI will convert to DIVX using DIVX PRO but if the same video is captured in MPEG2 and converted to DIVX with DIVX PRO, the sound and video are not in synch. Any suggestions

[DVDDoug]

What are you capturing from? What is the native format of your camera/capture device?

- It's best to avoid on-the-fly conversion. That may be what's corrupting your MPEG-2 file, and that corruption may be causing sync problems when you convert it to DivX.

- It's also best to convert/compress once to your final format. All of these compression schemes are lossy. You loose some quality when you compress to MPEG-2, and you loose some more quality when you convert the mPEG-2 to DivX.

- "AVI" is not a single format. It is a "container" file that can contain audio and video with almost any type of compression. If you have a MiniDV camera, you should capture to AVI/DV. AVI/DV requires 13GB per hour, and it's more trouble-free than the more-compressed formats. If you have AVI/DV files, you should convert/compress the video to your desired format the last step after editing.

[cswimm]

thanks.
I have a Mini DV and an analog feed from a PVR and usually capture movies in MPEG2 and burn to DVD - this works fine. But for some movies that are more than 2 hours I need to create 3 DVDs at the highest quality- thats a lot of work. I wanted to create a DIVX file that will play on my DIVX capable DVD player. I avoided capturing in AVI/DV format because of disk storage issues so capturing to MPEG2 was great until I tried converting them to DIVX.

So I guess the best solution is to capture in AVI/DV format and convert to DIVX. Also need to clean up by Hard drive for them to fit.

Thanks again

[Ken Berry]

It is unlikely that your PVR will give you the option of capturing to DV/AVI. Uncompressed .AVI is the usual option and that is five times bigger files than DV, so you are unlikely to choose this if you already think DV is too big. In other words, you are limited to capturing from the PVR using mpeg-2.

If you are worried about squeezing more than 2 hours onto a single DVD, though, why not simply change the mpeg-2 bitrate to something which will allow this. 4000 kbps and also using a compressed audio format like Dolby or mpeg layer 2, will allow up to around 2.5 hours at reasonable quality and still in the original mpeg-2 format.

From your camera, though, continue capturing in DV format, editing in that format, and doing the DivX conversion at that point

[cswimm]

Thanks mate
Your suggestions have been helpful

[2Dogs]

Audio out of sync problems are fairly common with DivX and Mpeg4 encoding. The usual way people deal with this is to split or "demux" the video and audio streams, and then apply a delay, either +ve or -ve to the audio to get it in sync. It can be a bit hit and miss, finding the right amount of delay. Fortunately the "muxing" process of joining the audio and video streams together again does not take long - it's the video encoding that takes the most time - so you can do trial muxes fairly quickly and go back and change the delay as required.

For encoding stuff to DivX, you can use AutoGK, a pretty powerful freeware encoder. I usually opt to use the Xvid codec rather than DivX. It's an open source codec that offers more features and better compression than DivX, but you can choose between available codecs if you run into incompatibility issues on your player.

If your playback target is a pc, and you wanted to go for the best possible quality for a given filesize on your compilation DVD, and your pc has lots of resources (i.e. it's quick!) then you might consider encoding to H.264, using another freeware program called MeGUI. Again, you can demux video and audio and mux them together later to avoid OOS issues. The program makes use of an open-source version of the H.264 codec, x264, which is to H.264 what Xvid is to DivX. It has more features and can give better picture quality for a given file size. One advantage of encoding to H.264 is that you can make use of AAC audio, which gives better compression than mpeg audio, leaving more headroom for the video bitrate.

Both of the above programs are oriented towards working with mpeg2 source material, although they do support other formats. I find MeGUI particularly useful for shrinking my home movies down to a size that I can carry on flash media or on the limited space available on my laptop hard drive - but using a high quality encoding profile it takes six or seven hours to encode a one hour video using my C2D laptop.

I would love to use VS to encode to DivX or H.264 - but unfortunately it's capabilities are woefully lacking, which maybe is fair enough in a consumer oriented program.