Capture from VHS video to DivX

Hello people. I'm capturing VHS videos to DivX 5.0.2, i've connected a video (aiwa) via a 'SCART to Video Composite' cable to my TV-In on my GeForce2 Ti/500. I'm using VirtualVCR 2.3.1 to capture the video and encode it realtime to DivX. The sound stays uncompressed PCM 44khz 16bit Stereo. Now my problem: 1) I'd like to also compress the sound realtime, but VirtualVCR doesn't seem to be able to do that. Any suggestions for other similar applications? 2) I tried VirtualDub 1.4.10, but it is so badly written and its awful to use. It also can't capture from my WDM drivers, it gives weird errors about unsupported video format and stuff like that, when VirtualVCR does it perfectly. 3) I also loaded the resulting DivX file from VirtualVCR with the uncompressed sound into VirtualDub, and i told it to compress the sound only and leave the video as it is. The result was awful, the sound was TOTALY out of sync with the video. Now my questions: 1) Is there a program which can capture properly and compress both video and sound without sync problems? 2) If not, is there a way to compress the sound in my already created DivX files without causing sync problems? I'd appriciate any help. Thank you. files

audio sync problems 

I would say that your sync problems are due to dropped frames. Try capturing with a codec other than divx, such as the Huffyuv codec. see if this helps.

When the sound is in sync uncompressed, it should also be in sync after compression - can't be dropped frames, I think. Maybe it has to do with b-frames... try to seperate audio and video, compress the audio with Lame, then mux it again.

Problem Solved! 

Indeed it can't be dropped frames. First of all the encoding to divx from the VHS tape was done with 0 (zero :) dropped frames, and we are talking about 3 hours of tape. The reprocessing only affects the compression of the audio, so there are no dropped frames here either. The result avi file (divx,uncomp. pcm audio) is perfectly sync'ed. Apparently the sync problems were caused by the VBR encoding. Once i compressed the audio with the latest LAME codec in CBR 128kbps 44khz, the result was perfectly sync'ed. Is this problem with VBR and sync very common? Or am i doing something wrong?

@sehh, VBR or ABR mp3 must be muxed with Nandub, not VDub. When you said you used mp3 default compression in VDub, I thought you compressed with the Fraunhofer codec (which is CBR only). However I also had problems with that CBR Fraunhofer method recently (even it had always been working when I last used it, but that was even before Divx4 :)) For Divx5 and mp3, I only use Lame now and I always mux with Nandub - this was never problematic. However VBR mp3 is indeed not the most compatible audio for avi files - for example BSPlayer is always running out of sync with VBR mp3 on my computer (even it is a really good player, no doubt about that).

ronnylov, i downloaded and tested AVI_IO, indeed it is a superb application. Not only does it create perfectly sync'ed divx files (that vdub didn't do), but it also has a nice and easy to use interface. :D Definetly worth paying for. I hope the author adds support to encode the audio aswell.

theReal, i understand we have different perceptions on 'quality software'. Thats understandable, we are different people, so we are bound to have different ideas. I personaly found vDub to be a very poorly designed piece of software. Obviously i do not have a long experience with video editing software, so i can't compare with the competition. But as a software developer i can guarantee that vDub would never pass a single QA (Quality Assurance) or UI (User Interface) test in ANY large software development team. On the usability side, it did work reliably when i had to edit a huge avi file to compress the sound, and remove some unwanted parts. Although it did not work correctly when i did some capturing or video encoding.