need help with pinnacle dazzle and making smallest high quality vids possible

[jackulator]

I bought the dazzle last week and it records tv and stuff great, which makes me think it would probably record my ps2 just as well - and your ps3 looks great, but for some reason when I try to record my PC - playing COD, it doesn't look anywhere as good as the TV recordings - sucks

plus, the software that came with the Dazzle makes giant goddamn files - so I tried using Windows Media Encoder so I could encode in WMV format - and that's better, but in order to have anything resembling decent quality the files end up at around 20MB/minute of video

how in the HELL do those people who post 700MB avi files out of Hollywood films get 90-120 minutes of movie into 700MB? if you go by 105 that's about 7MB/min - and it's better quality than I can get with WMV files, which are much smaller than AVI files - I'm really frustated on this

[prankyoudude]

if u have the dazzle dvd recorder, and you open the studio there  4 otions above the start record button

it says some like

OK Quality,goodqiality, better, DVD qually....


it doesnt say it but when u move ur mouse over the  button that look like " ....." dots those are the quality change....uou mmight still have ur quality on dvd...

[R2Bl3nd]

Try downloading the ffdshow codec, and use H.264 as your compression. H.264 is by far the smallest video codec. Also, make sure the audio is encoded in mp3 format. If this program doesn't have the capabilities to compress the audio, just use VirtualDub to do it. I'll make a small tutorial for this if you really need it.

Also, what do you mean by the recordings of your computer having bad quality? I know if you output it to a standard-definition TV it will look bad, but does it even look bad when you play it back on your computer?

[jackulator]

well the signal has to be output from VGA to 480i or whatever the resolution is for normal tv - but for some reason ACTUAL TV recorded with the dazzle looks fine, but the PC's video signal dumbed down to 480i looks much crappier than the TV recordings

as far as virtual dub - that's cake - also the other day when I was pissed going through AVIs of movies trying to figure out what codec they used and be that small (only 700MB on average) and virtual dub said it was ffdshow, which I downloaded, but I couldn't figure out what was what

I did research a few weeks ago and found the sorenson codec, and I remember I had H.264 on my laptop at some point - I don't know what happened to it - I knew it was one of the best but after trying out all of the others I had I pretty much gave up on codecs and thought there must be something else I was doing wrong - but I didn't try H.264 yet - I'll give ffdshow another look-see and maybe I can figure out how to make sure H.264 is installed, and available to my various video programs - thanks for your help guys

[R2Bl3nd]

H264 is included with FFDshow, but only available as an internal configuration. When a window pops up with a quality bar and a list of codecs (it should say 'Full frames (uncompressed)'), you select ffdshow, then go to the config and select H264 from there. And to get high quality video recorded from a pc on to your TV, it is best to record it at a very low resoloution. 480i is a very bad format anyway, so I suggest using and HD format if you have sufficient funds. You can get a really good small HDTV for a few hundred bucks, which is what I suggest.

Also, as a side note, did you know that an HDMI cable is digital, so you won't have any picture noise whatsoever? TVs can get staticy with even HD component cables, but HDMI uses a completely digital signal. It' more like the quality of an LCD computer monitor, without even the slightest bit of picture noise. Just an interesting fact o' the day.