Orinoco_Womble

Hey, thanks for that suggestion mate, that’s awesome! I’ll give that a go. 😃

Hi all.
I’ve just bought a new video capture card, but the software that comes with it only allows captures in H264.
Can anyone please recommend some preferably free software that I can use to capture from the card using the Largarith lossless codec?

On its way to you now mate :)

I still have a copy of TooT.  Send me a PM with your email addy and I'll email it to you matey.

Thanks for the heads up SilverWook, it's great news that this movie is finally getting a decent DVD release.

Could someone please suggest a way for those of us who are outside of the USA to order a copy of this DVD?

EDIT: DOHH! It looks like this will be available through Amazon.com

Nice example Msycamore.  Every time I see examples like that I feel just that little bit more annoyed at old georgie and all the guys at Lucas Film.

I certainly don't mind you asking.  Actually, I was sent that particular manual by Karyudo and am still very grateful to him for that.

I have a couple of different service manuals now, but unfortunately not for the model you listed.  I have come across a few of them simply by searching the net for the players model number or the part number for the manual.

Hopefully, some kind person out there will read your post and offer to send you the manual.  I would if I had it.

Good luck with your search mate.

Holy crap, this really is excellent work guys!

It looks like Mothers idea to use the test pattern from Jason and the Argonauts LD is the best way to empirically test which LD player is best and what connection to use.

It will be interesting to see how the 4300D stacks up against the D925 with that test pattern.

I would agree with what you've said and should clarify my earlier statements.  The 925 is not altogether 'undetailed', but the other 2 players do look slightly more detailed and more natural.  When you do a side by side comparison on the same TV and switching between the players at the same time, it's straight away obvious that some of the detail looks like it has been smoothed over on the 925 almost like DVNR.  You only really notice this when you do a side by side comparison, otherwise if you are just watching a movie the 925 looks fine for the most part except for the crappy comb filtering especially on strong colours.

Yeah, the HQ should always be set off on the 925.  It looks truly awful with that on.

I checked the circuit diagrams for the 4300D and the BNC connector comes from exactly the same place as the RCA connector.  There won't be any difference in picture quality or detail if your DVD recorder or capture setup uses RCA plugs.

Very interesting test.  It would be even more interesting to see how the 1050 stacks up against this lot as I think it may well prove to give the best and most detailed PAL picture.

The only other thing I would add, is that I have 2x 4300D players. One of which shows slightly unstable colours which looks a bit like 'blotching' (can't describe it any other way).  The other one is a lot more stable and looks much better.  I only mention this as it looks like the 4300D you used has the similar colour blotching issues that my first player had.

It would also be very interesting to see the test repeated on a frame with saturated red or blue to see what difference the comb filter will make to the picture, the 925 shows really nasty combing effects on high saturation colours.  Any idea if the 909 is any better than the 925 for comb-filtering of colours?

What were the settings for the comb filter in the DVD recorder?  Did you have this set to 3D or 2D?

Keep up the excellent work mate!

dark_jedi said:

Depends on the brand, some do not even last 6 months, I have Verbatim DL's that are 3 & 4 years old and still read great, also I don't think anyone uses DL -r's, only +r's.

-R's are more popular in Japan than +R for some reason.  I think I read somewhere that Taiyo Yuden didn't support +R DL because they found them unreliable to manufacture in high quality or high volume (or something like that), which is why they only make +R SL discs.

There is a lot of useful info at the site below about who manufacturers what discs and what countries they come from and what brands are recommended buy or avoid etc

http://www.digitalfaq.com/reviews/dvd-media.htm

Hope this helps.

I use RW's to transfer off air recordings from my DVD/HDD recorder to the PC so that I can edit out adverts etc.  Apart from that, nahh, they are pretty unreliable for storing anything long term.  Imation RW's seem to be the most unreliable from my experience.

I had a look last night at the DVD versions.  I gotta say I am HUGELY impressed and absolutely grateful to DJ and everyone else involved in this project.  Many, many, many thanks guys, I sooooo much appreciate all of your hard work.  This looks so much better and the sound is just awesome!

... kinda makes me dislike old Georgy just that little bit more now :/

This looks pretty interesting. Are you working with the PAL or NTSC GOUT/SE?

I'd love to watch this if at all possible.  Is there any chance someone could pretty please send me an MS invite?

You might like to have a look at Arnie.d's V8 thread which had a very interesting discussion about averaging here

G-Force was pretty adamant that doing a median of multiple captures will give better results than averaging.

Hope this helps.

Many thanks for the advice guys.  I'll have a try with your suggestions over the weekend. :)

Got a tricky one that I need help with please.

Is there any software out there that anyone knows that will allow me to go through AVI video and skip to the parts where there is movement?

I have a wireless camera set up to record security footage of my car during work hours.  The camera streams video to a laptop in the boot of the car which runs all day.  So far I have a couple of months of AVI's at 8hrs per day.

The reason I'm asking is that I've just noticed a dent in the car today which I don't remember seeing before and wanted to check the hours of footage to see if I can see anyone causing the damage.

I've tried searching on google and downloaded a couple of freeware bits and pieces, but so far I can't find anything that does what I need.

Any advice please?

I've not had an opportunity to test the 2950 myself, but I do have a few PAL players that might be of interest.  I don't have a decent capture card to test them definitively, but from what I can tell by doing a side by side comparison, here's how they stack up to each other:

D925 - sharpest picture of the PAL players that I've seen.  Very 'digital' looking picture and lacking in detail. When you compare side by side to the other 2 players.  The picture looks like DVNR was applied to the D925 to give it a lower noise floor which smooths over a lot of the fine detail. Consequently the detail level does not look to be as high as the other two players.

V4300D - industrial player - more detailed than the D925, although quite noisy and very soft picture. The picture looks very analogue and 'natural' compared to the D925 which looks very 'digitised' when seen side by side.  The detail level is great, but the amount of noise and soft picture might be a problem.

CLD-1050 - analogue PAL only player - again, a very analogue and extremely 'natural' looking picture. Easily looks better than the V4300D and more detailed than the D925.  Less noise than the V4300D and slightly sharper picture with better colours.  The most natural looking picture of the 3 players.  More detailed picture than the other 2, although still softer picture than the D925.

The verdict: the D925 has less noise and a sharper picture, but the V4300D and 1050 seem to have more detail and a more natural looking picture over all.  The 1050 in particular has the most natural and pleasing picture of the 3, although it is lacking in sharpness.  It would be interesting to see how the 2950 stacks up to these players.

Hope this helps.

Excellent.  Thanks for that Moth3r, I had completely missed that James Bond  thread.

Thanks for the info Adywan, that's exactly what I needed to know.  Much appreciated mate :)

Moth3r said:

The 44056Hz rate was also mentioned here; I'm leaning towards the "load of old poo" answer.

Thanks for clarifying.  A load of old poo it is then :)

I was under the impression that some audio cards could not resample a digital input in realtime. I could be wrong, I haven't captured many PCM streams to my PC. If the card can do it then fine - but I would still compare the results against a software upsample.

Isnt that exactly the opposite of what D.Carroll was saying?

D. Carroll said 

Sound cards that have codecs (coder/decoder) that conform to the AC97
spec will resample all audio to 48kHz.

 Maybe the AC97 chip/codec just doesn't do a very good job of the resample in real time.  Probably safer to stick to what everyone is recommending and capture 44.1K and resample in s/w.

I've heard that DTS is actually easier - no demodulator required, for a start.

Sweet. Might just give this a go then just to see how that works.

Many thanks for the advice Moth3r, you've filled in a lot of the blanks :)

I came across this post on IMDB which I thought might interest some people here.  Hopefully we will see a DVD release of this movie sometime soon from WB Archives through their Made To Order DVD - MOD service.  From what I understand the MOD release DVD's are generally not remastered or specially re-transferred, so it's likely to come from a broadcast master tape or maybe even the same master that was used to create the LD.

Unfortunately, it looks like MOD releases are only available in the USA, so it's  kinda suckey for the rest of us elsewhere in the world who dearly want to enjoy this movie in decent quality.

Thanks for the info Moth3r, I think that's pretty much exactly what I needed to find out.

Unfortunately though it looks like audio cards based on those two chips are no longer available new and are not currently for sale second hand on EBay either.  Bummer :(

However cards based on the newer CMedia CMI8768 might possibly work, so I might give one of those a try and see what happens.

On futher searching into this topic, I've found quite a few posts from people who mention all sorts of things which make this even more confusing.  Some people have mentioned that the 2-ch audio sample rate for PAL is 44.1KHz (same as CD), but NTSC is 44056Hz.  I'm pretty sure at best 'cheapie' audio cards with optical SPDIF in will only manage 44.1KHz.  Any idea if this is true? bob23 mentions it here and Buster D mentions it here.  It's also mentioned in the LD FAQ here, but others have said it's a load of poo.  Dnewhous thinks so according to this post here.  Who's right?

Also, you mentioned in this thread about having to up-sample the 2-ch 44.1KHz audio to 48KHz for DVD player compatibility.  If this is the case, then why not just capture at 48KHz and have the audio h/w do the re-sampling for you? Or is this one of those cases where the cheap HW will give audio artefacts and it's more reliable (pure?) to use s/w for the up-sample?

Lastly, Darth Editious mentions having to strip out padding from the captured AC3 raw audio stream here.  Has anyone else come across this and can suggest an easy method to remove the padding please?

Many thanks again guys :)

PS: Not that I really need to capture LD - DTS digital audio streams, but has anyone figured that out?  I can't seem to find anything much on that at all.

Hi all,

I've been reading around trying to find which audio card is appropriate to use for LD captures.  The LD player I'm using is a CLD-D925 and I've also got the an external pioneer AC3 demodulator.  The D925 has digital optical output for the 2ch audio/DTS and the AC3 demodulator also has digital optical outputs.

Could someone please recommend a particular brand+model of audio card (pref PCI) that is up to the job? (hopefully not too expensive as I've already spent my LD budget this year).  This should allow me to capture both digital audio stream from the D925's optical output as well as he 5.1 optical from the AC3 demodulator.

Many thanks in advance.