Interlacing Problem

[Krehator]

My System: P4 2.4 GHz, Asus P4P800, 1gig DDR, GeForce 4 TI 8X 128meg.

Capture Card: Hauppage PVR 150 PCI

My Equipment Config: DishNetwork DVR522. Capture card hooked up via cable coax splitter before TV. I've also tried Composite.

I bought this card because the DVR522 is nearly impossible to pull videos off. Also most of the DVR's require service. I previously had a PVR 250 USB2 which went back to the store 5 minutes after I witnessed the quality (horrible).

My PVR 150 works better and I prefer the direct PCI interface over troublesome USB. Yet I'm still getting interlacing problems at higher resolutions. My whole point of buying this was to capture DVD quality from my DVR recordings saved in my DVR522 so I could edit and then burn them to DVD. When I play back the saved MPEG's I can clearly see interlacing, especially in high motion scenes. The only way I can get rid of it is to drop the resolution to VCD quality or half-d1. This is sensless since I already had an old WinTV which could do that flawlessly. I want DVD quality!!! (sigh)

What can I do to de-interlace these recordings? Otherwise I'm taking this PVR 150 back to the store. I've tried the WinTV2000, GB-PVR, SageTV(don't work at all), DVR3 (don't work at all), DScaler (bad lag on recording). GB-PVR records but I still see interlacing.

I've tried every combination of CBR/VBR and resolution possible with this card. Like I said the only thing that works is VCD or Half-D1, both poor options for what I consider high quality.

Is there something I can do or should I get rid of this card?

TIA,
Krehator

[j3flight]

Burn them to DVD still interlaced.

You don't want to deinterlace them, they're meant to be encoded as an interlaced MPEG. You'll actually lose quality if you deinterlace them before burning to DVD. You only see the interlaced problems because you're watching the mpeg on a monitor (inherently a progressive device). If you want to watch them on your monitor and have them look good, download ffdshow and turn on deinterlacing. (Get the most recent version, with a 2005 release date, works great.)

When shown on a television or other device connected to a standard DVD player, you will not see the interlacing because the output device will deinterlace it for you.
EDIT: to be more specific, if the output device is a CRT (non-HD) television, it will just show it interlaced because that is its native format.

MORE EDIT:
deinterlacing is something that is difficult to get right and look good from my experience. ffdshow seems to do the best job of anything i've tried. Unfortunately their documentation SUCKS HARD and few of its options are explained anywhere. Make sure to get the most recent version labeled 2005. For some reason it's not linked on their website, just google it.

Jason

PS: The reason WinTV doesn't look interlaced is because it does a blend of the interlaced frames. This is a crappy method of deinterlacing which shows up pretty badly in 24fps film sources. (You will see vertical lines go blurry, sharp, blurry, sharp if the camera pans left or right. Burn one to DVD, and play it back to your TV if you don't believe me. =)

[Krehator]

Ahhhh. I didn't know that. Darn it... to think how many times I've re-recorded things when I didn't have to. rofl. Of all the forums I've posted on, your the first to tell me this about the computer monitor. Thanks, I will give it a try.

I guess you can still teach an old dog new tricks...

[Guest]

I recorded an NBA game (high action) and a cartoon (with very little action) and burned them to DVD. The resultant image, played back on my TV through my DVD player, was identical to the mpeg version on my monitor. The problem is that the quality just wasn't that good. Any motion at all in the image degrades the quality immensely.

How can I resolve this?

Setup:
Athlon 1.6ghz
Western Dig 120GB 7200rpm hard drive
Hauppauge PVR-150

Broadcasts were recorded with image capture set to 'TV quality'

[j3flight]

You're not using high enough bitrate with LiveTV quality. Especially with cartoons. I record using Variable bitrate, with Average 6500kbps and Max 8000kbps. That might be a little high for some people, but it looks great and disk space isn't a problem, so I don't fiddle with it.

Reference:
http://www.mediachance.com/dvdlab/tutorial/bitrate.html
(site is actually down for the moment, but should be back up)

I suggest modifying the MEDIUM quality so that, by default, your recordings will be recorded with these settings. Otherwise you'll have to change the quality every time you pick a recording. If you're wanting to burn a DVD, remember you need to capture at as high a quality as you can, and then drop the bitrate/filesize during a transcode. (Your DVD software will do this for you if it needs to probably - it takes a while.) If you capture the video to fit within a certain size, it won't look as good. It's like when scanning and editing a photo. You always want to scan it at as high a resolution as possible to get as much detail from the picture as you can. You can always shrink it down later, but you can never ADD picture information.

Jason

[colin]

hey DrKranium,

I assume the quality of this recording when watching on a monitor must have been bad as a TV is more forgiving (unles you have a HDTV).

Are you recording in VBR or CBR mode? And what do you do with the recording when putting this onto DVD?

And also what is the quality of your src like?

cheers,
Colin.

[colin]

Hey Krehator,

if you want to learn more about interlacing, etc. http://nickyguides.digital-digest.com/interlace.htm.

If you need to de-interlace then read up on avisynth,

cheers,
Colin.

[Krehator]

I like to used TmpegEnc to edit out the commercials. Are you saying I should not toggle the de-interlacing on or the quality will degrade?

I use TmpegEnc to convert AVI captures from my old WinTv-Go card all the time and they come out with no interlacing on the monitor but look fine when I burn them to DVD.

The DVD hardware will attempt to de-interlace again and actually make it worse?

Also, thanks for the help. I'll check out the link your provided.

As for the bitrate settings I set them as high as possible. I figured that best thing I can do is capture at highest quality just to get it to file on the HD, then if I want to change anything it's easier to use software like tmpeg. There is a small problem regarding file size going over 4 gig on WinXP with long captures but so far I'm only capturing hour long episodes that end up 2 Gig each. Final cuts after editing come out to about 1.3gig per episode which works perfect after I build a menu with DVD author. 3 Episodes per DVD.

[j3flight]

You'll have to do some experimenting. But yes, you should probably not deinterlace the videos when editing in TmpegEnc. Almost all DVDs you purchase from the video store are encoded as interlaced MPEG2. That is exactly the format in which you are capturing from your PVR250, so there is no need to do the extra deinterlacing.

Your WinTV2Go thing probably captured non-interlaced (was it a software encoder?) That's why it looked the same on the monitor and TV.

Jason