Capturing amiga rgb into mpeg2

[Zac67]

RGB capture cards are AFAIK only available for industrial purposes (=very pricey).
A very easy way to get near RGB quality through SVideo:
- get a decent Supervideo genlock (my Hama 292 was 8€, it's OK but not great)
- get a PVR card with hardware compression, use only highest bitrate (my Hauppage PVR PCI was ~15€)
  or a DV bridge and capture through Firewire (marginally better quality)
  or use the VideoIn of your graphics card (quality varies widely depending on hardware/driver/CPU speed)
- convert to MPEG-2/lower bitrate with a decent software compression, I like TMPGEnc a lot.

I wouldn't recommend converting directly to DVD rate MPEG-2: consumer hardware generates numerous artifacts, esp. when dealing with high contrast/hard edges video like the one you're likely to capture here.

[Zac67]

Tomas wrote:

I think using a non lossy software codec would be better option though..
My plan was to record either uncompressed or with a dvd record at highest possible bitrate and then re encode it to mpeg2 using software like tmpgenc on a pc or similar.

Hmm... 704x576 x 25 x 24 / 8 = 30 MB/s = 1.8 GB/min
Sounds like fun...
The highest bit rate of our WinTV PVR 350 is 12 Mbps with a very pretty quality, a lot better than any DVD recorder I've seen yet. Can't see much difference to the output of our DV bridge (Rainbow something).

Where can one get a supervideo genlock these days anyways?

Used? Very nice and very cheap.