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[Griff]

I have old vhs tapes that I need to convert to HD and then probably something else.
What is the best format?
Is there a lossless one.
Say like what ape does for audio.

Thanks

[JimH]

I'll tell you what I believe, but it may not be reliable.

AVI is like WAV.  It's an exact image.

MPEG2 is like MP3.  It's a compressed image.

MPEG4 is supposed to be better compression.

Also check DIVX.

[Fastyves]

Have a look at http://gknot.doom9.org/ and at http://www.doom9.org/ (> The Guides)

Yves.

[cjdshaw]

AVI is like WAV, but that doesn't mean it's an exact image. AVI and WAV are both wrapper formats which can contain data encoded in any number of ways. WAV is usually uncompressed, and therefore exact, but AVI's are almost always lossily compressed. The sheer amount of data for an uncompressed video stream is such that only high end professionals tend to use it. It adds up to about 20Mb per second for full resolution. That's about 120Gb for a movie.

I'm not aware of a lossless video codec since the compression would be fairly minimal. If your video is coming off VHS, I wouldn't worry too much about lesslessness(?) since the quality will be very bad to start with. DiVX at about 700kbits per second should give you as good quality as the VHS, particularly if you have the time to do 2 pass encoding.

[BEXX]

I'd check out www.doom9.org and read up some.

A stream of video is huge...  640x480 video @ 30 frames per second...  900KB/s frame = 27MB/sec = 1.620GB/minute = 97.2GB/hour = big ass movie without audio.

ANyways for making VHS backups...  the key to good quality isn't really the compression format, you need a good quality capture card.  Theres some that'll do hardware mpeg2 compression too and make things easier...  if you set that to 12Mbits/sec it'd be great quality.  DVDs probably avg 8-10Mbits/sec.

VirtualDub |PLS| nice capture card with either hardware or software mpeg2 would be my sugestion.

(BTW I'm pretty sure on all this information, but I'm wouldnt' bet my life on it, its a start tho)

[SBrandsborg aka Mouseman]

Xvid is the best... even better than DivX