Jason Dunn
03-12-2004, 09:00 PM
Yesterday I captured an old VHS tape with three hours of content (it was a taping of a Cyrano de Bergerac play starring Derek Jacobi) and have decided that rather than burning it to DVD (which would be a challenge with three hours of video), I wanted to keep it as a high-quality Windows Media Video file. I do Firewire capturing on my laptop (Fujitsu P5010D) to an external Maxtor USB 2.0 hard drive (160 GB). When I want to really keep the quality level high, I use the File Archive setting in the Windows Media Encoder, and set it to VBR Quality 95 (which retains the 720 x 480 resolution), CD quality audio, and let it rip. With three hours of media at that quality setting, guess long long the media encoding is taking? It's been running for 19 hours so far and there's another 24 hours or so left over. Crazy! 8O Granted, this is a 900 MHz P-4M, but still...talk about needing some serious patience. :lol: The higher the quality of the transcode, the longer it will take - if I wanted to do a 640 x 480 version, it would likely only take several hours. Consider yourself warned! ;-)