Thursday, July 17, 2003

PicVideo MJPEG

From the Virtual VCR help forums I found this table of capture sizes by jamesp. These are 1 minute captures, 720x480, 30fps 48kHz audio:

Uncompressed - 956Mb
Huffyuv - 502Mb
MJPEG Q20 - 416Mb
MJPEG Q19 - 164Mb
MJPEG Q18 - 101Mb
MJPEG Q17 - 75Mb

The MJPEG numbers are using the PicVideo MJPEG compressor at various quality settings (Q20 is the highest quality). Most folks encode using Q18 (long movies) or Q19 (near perfect quality). Using these figures, those 10Gb caps that I did yesterday would have only been 3.3 Gb at Q19 (3x smaller then Huffyuv).

My current planned workflow for converting old VHS recordings to DVD is to shoot for the 352x240 MPEG2 DVD format as an initial target (supposedly it's a valid resolution for DVD). Most of the VHS stuff that I have is pretty noisy and won't be worth trying for 720x480. Got a bit more to figure out before I get there though.

640x480, YUV2, no audio compression, PicVideo MJPEG at Q19 resulted in 2.5Mb/sec and rare dropped frames (1 in 4000 or so). CPU utilization was a modest 25%. That's a pretty decent performance and space savings for $28. Heck, I may go for 720x480 at the capture stage to give me the option to go to DVD 720x480 on the end.

posted by Wuphon's at 12:26 PM