VfW video capture guide

Here you will find some tips for capture with ATV2000 in VfW. Enter Capture mode and open Preferences dialog by pressing F10 key. Here set main parameters:

Video

Video size - set desired video capture resolution, for NTSC maximum resolution is 640x480 and for PAL 768x576. Some drivers, especially with BT848/878 chipsets, doesn't provide preview in overlay mode if vertical resolution is half of max lines or more. In this case turn off preview or switch to Preview mode.

Encoding - must be set corresponding to desired compressor. Some compressors works best with YUV modes like MJPEG codecs (use YUY2) and other RGB modes (for example Indeo). Please be sure that not all capture devices supports all encoding models. Recommended encodings which offten wors are YUY2 and RGB24.

Framerate - framerate of video to capture. Typically you should set it to 25 fps for PAL/SECAM and 29.97/30fps for NTSC.

Video buffers - number of ábuffers used to store video frames. More buffers can decrease dropped frames on peak performance penalties, but requires more memory.

Avaliable compressorsá - this is list of avalaible compressors for current format, but selection has no effect (see below). Select Open compression dialog after setup done if you want to open Compression dialog after pressing OK button.

Preserve video size - check if you want to adjust window to size of video. In preview mode there will be no stretching.

Hit OK to capture - check if you want to display dialog before capture starts.

Audio

If you want audio, select audio parameters too. Also you can set number of Audio buffers like by video.

Audio stream is masterá - the implementation of synchronization is different then in WDM. Synchronization is done by dropping frames, not by adjusting framerate in AVI file. Typically there is no need to check this box.


Compression

Video compression can be set only with standart Windows dialog and cannot be remembered (so no profiles are implemented in VfW), press F9 to open it or press Ctrl+F9 to open Audio Compression. After changing video parameters, compression must be set again, because it is reset to none when changing encoding. There is one method to store compression, which uses VirtualDub - it works directly with video samples and passes it to compressor manualy, not throw VfW interface. If you want to use this method, select VirtualDub in Options/Application.