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TV Tuner vs. Firewire

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I normally capture analog video as DV over firewire (VCR into my DV camera into my PC). I have a laptop and external hard drive, so capturing uncompressed video is out of the question. While pondering the quality lost in converting to DV and then MPEG2 (for DVD), I wondered if it would be best to just capture analog video directly to MPEG2. Do external (usb) TV tuners have better or even comparable MPEG2 encoding compared to my current workflow? Or do they suffer from real-time encodes whereas my DV to MPEG2 conversion is multi-pass?

Also, I've never used software to cut MPEG2s along the GOP so as not to recompress them. Obviously, my goal would be to splice my original captured MPEG2s together onto a DVD without ever recompressing them, so there is no generational loss from capture to output. Has anyone worked like this? It seems limiting compared to DV in Vegas, which is much more malleable than cutting along a GOP.
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Maybe I should narrow my question down to this: What do you guys use to capture? Uncompressed to a RAID? DV through a camera? MPEG2 TV tuner?
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Very few people will capture uncompressed video; using the huffyuv codec for capturing will compress the video by approx 3:1 with no loss.

The next best thing after that is MJPEG compression, closely following by DV compression; both of these give better compression (smaller file sizes) than huffyuv but are lossy.

MPEG-2 on-the-fly compression is really for convenience only, in a DVD recorder or a PC used as a PVR (when you want to store small capture files for immediate playback).

Best results are obtained by capturing lossless video, editing/processing the capture file, then encoding to MPEG-2 using a VBR multi-pass encode.

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