convert VHS to digital using HVR 1600 and wintv 7

[BillL]

I am in the process of converting old VHS to digital, editing them and burning them to DVD. I am using wintv 7 and the HVR 1600. The digital video came out good or as good as you would hope given the age of the VCR tapes.

My problem is that I tried to open the digital file with Adobe Premiere Elements and it did not recogize the MPEG2 .ts format. I have searched high and low through Google and can not come up with a solution. Can the HVR 1600 create any other format other than .ts (transport stream)? Is my adobe software incompatible with this format and I just need to purchase a different editor? What are my options?

[TheNewGuy]

WinTV7 always produces .ts file. If you editor of choice cant handle this format, you can always download software to convert the .ts file to something else before you open it in the editor. For example, Arcsoft Media Converter etc.

[BillL]

I noticed that under advanced options, you can check the box that says auto convert MPEG-2 to .mpg. Is this a bad option?

[TheNewGuy]

You can try that option. I didnt suggest it because some people have had problems with it (which we intend to investigate in the near future).

[BillL]

1.) Is there an editor that people on this forum would suggest that is optimized or at least compatible with the native .ts files?

2.) If I went the arcsoft route... Does the act of converting the analog => MPEG-2 ts => MPEG => VOB cause degradation of quality? Put another way, Every time you convert the format to something else, do you lose quality?

[Kiwi]

A freeware splitter that u can use, is TSSplitter.

[TheNewGuy]

Originally Posted by BillL

2.) If I went the arcsoft route... Does the act of converting the analog => MPEG-2 ts => MPEG => VOB cause degradation of quality? Put another way, Every time you convert the format to something else, do you lose quality?

The first conversion, done by the capture card, will always result in some quality loss, regardless of whether your recording to a .ts or .mpg container file (both contain exactly the MPEG2 video data, just muxed to a particular file format). Converting from .ts to .mpg is just a remux, ie conversion of the file format. It is a quick operation that doesnt result in any change to the quality of the video.

Conversion from with .ts/.mpg to a vob file is usually just a remux aswell, not requiring any quality loss, but it does depend on how this conversions is done - since some software may instead opt to re-encode (instead of remuxing).