[MPlayer-users] Digital camcoder

[D Richard Felker III]

On Fri, Nov 28, 2003 at 08:42:19PM +0100, Grzegorz Borowiak wrote:
> [Automatic answer: RTFM (read DOCS, FAQ), also read DOCS/bugreports.html]
> On Fri, 28 Nov 2003, D Richard Felker III wrote:
> 
> > [Automatic answer: RTFM (read DOCS, FAQ), also read DOCS/bugreports.html]
> > On Fri, Nov 28, 2003 at 05:36:05PM +0100, Grzegorz Borowiak wrote:
> > > [Automatic answer: RTFM (read DOCS, FAQ), also read DOCS/bugreports.html]
> > > Ehlo!
> > >
> > > I'm about to buy a digital camcoder. I consider mainly Sony's products (I
> > > need their night shot feature). Is this possible to connect camcoder to PC
> > > and run mencoder in such way that it would perform on-the-fly encoding
> > > what camera sends through USB? Or should I pull the whole uncompressed
> > > movie through USB to disk and then encode?
> > >
> > > Maybe somebody here has some experience with camcoders (esp. Sony's)?
> >
> > If you intend to use a dv camera in conjunction with computers, be
> > ABSOLUTELY SURE to get a PAL model with progressive mode. I expect
> > you'll already be getting PAL anyway since that's the standard in
> > Europe, but you should be aware that NTSC DV is unusably bad (horrible
> 
> Do NTSC really suck so much? How do Americans cope with this? Do they have
> a quality loss when converting to/from mpeg/divx?

Yes, but as you all know on the other side of the big pond, Americans
are stupid so we don't notice/care that the quality sucks. :(

BTW, here are the figures:

MPEG*, PAL-DV: 1 chroma sample for every 2x2 luma region
NTSC-DV: 1 chroma sample for every 4x1 luma region
MPEG* converted from NTSC-DV: 1 chroma for every 4x2 luma!!

At that point the color bleeding is so bad you'll wish you were just
recording black&white video...

Rich