Tv capture - what sort of system spec do i need

voxpop

I know that some of this have been discussed before but I was wondering what ppl think of the following :

Canopus ADVC-100 for the tv capture
http://www.dvdrhelp.com

This box of tricks seems to handle all the processing so I was thinking of getting a fairly modest system processor and memory. So something like

1ghz C3
or an old P3 >=700Mhz
256 megs or ram
Seagate barracuda 160gig 7200rpm drive

This box will be a mp3 player so I was thinking a good soundcard would be worth it - this is what i was thinking
santa cruz
or maybe a plain Audigy ?

Everything else shouldnt make much of a difference so what do ppl think of the spec, do i need a good graphics card also ??

SouperComputer

if you dont plan compressing on the fly, you can capture no problem with a 300Mhz machine.

since the card is doing the work for you, either chip is fine.

graphics card wont matter a toss, ATI seem to have better 2d image quality however, and DIVX player supports hardware postprocessing with most Radeon cards. ATI may be the way to go.

voxpop

From what ive heard its hard to get good quality while doing on the fly compression - maybe im wrong though ? With the above in mind i was going to do post capture compression - what sort of processor is recommended for reasonable compression times eg an hour to compress an hour of capture.

Also any recommendataion on quality sound cards would help, baring in mind I want to use the sound card as an audio source for my hifi ?

SouperComputer

id say to compress to divx in "real time" you'd need around an 1800 cpu of doing 720x 488 res

Mutant_Fruit

lots and lots and lots and lots of harddrive space.

If you're capturing uncompressed, i tihnk you need 1 gigabyte per 3 mins (maybe more), it might be 3 gigs per min. I can;t remember

voxpop

Jesus 1 gig for 3 minutes - I didnt think it would take up so much space uncompressed - "on the fly compression" here I come

vibe666

i capture full screen 768x(whatever it is) with my wintv pci using the picvideo mjpeg compressor set to 'almost' no compression (detail settings of about 16-18 in the config of the codec).

it's almost impossible to tell it's lossy unless you're really looking, but the extra space and less load on the HDD is worth the sacrifice. afaik i can get about 6-8 hours of (audio is 44100 mono pcm) video on the 40gb drive i use for capturing.

after capture i then cut the resolution in half and compress video using divx 5.11 at between 500-900kbps and MP3 the audio using LAME at 64kbps mono. all in virtualdub. sometimes with a little cropping depending on whether there are bars on the picture and the odd filter if it's too dark.

also usually have to boost the volume, as it either seems to capture at very low volume or too high and i get lots of clipping which is a pain. don't seemt o have any middle ground on it for some reason.

downside with the picvideo codec is you get their logo at the top and www.jpeg.com at the bottom, but you can crop that when you compress the video after you capture it. it's about 30 times top and bottom, so it's not too bad, and a lot of progs at the moment have a bar of about 40 lines top and bottom anyway, so you won't lose a thing.

btw, it's a P4 1.5ghz with 512mb of PC133 RAM, and 3x40gb 7200rpm HD's, and has no problems capturing or encoding, which on average is 1-2 hours per hour of video, depending on the amount of compression.

L1011

I used to dump in 640x480 16 bit Indeo 5 video/raw 16 bit audio from a Hauppauge card on a Duron 850 running BeOS. And BeOS is known for not liking AMD CPU's one bit, so speedwise it was like a 500Mhz machine. Your HDD is the biggest issue really - do too much other stuff on the same disk at the same time and you hit problems then.

I'd doubt you'll find an Indeo 5 encoder anywhere these days now though - it was failing so badly Intel basically chucked it for free to Be at the time (1999)

po0k

You could possibly encode to MPEG2 real-time, leaving the audio uncompressed, will give you ~2.4Gigs per hour at 640x480.
You'd also want to have the drive fairly well defragmented all the time too.

Also, for post-encoding, XVid for video with Ogg Vorbis for the sound

Open source all the way.

Mutant_Fruit

my school had a digital camera which we used for filming in transition year. Whatever format it captured the video in, it took up oceans of space per minute. It was probably 3 mins a gig, (3 gigs per min is rather a lot). So, on 40gigs, you could get 120 mins.

And another thing. When we captured, the limit was 4 gb's. If you captured one bte more than tat, the whole avi capture became useless. Is that limit still there. As far as i know its a windows thing.

And i recommend XviD aswell, its a helluva lot faster than divx (did someone say 2x faster at least), and quality is better. Check out the www.doom9.org codec comparison

vibe666

the 4gb file size limit is the maximum file size you can have if you use the fat32 file system on your capture drive. if you use ntfs you won't have those restrictions.

the number one consideration when capturing in uncompressed formats is the hard drive speed more than the cpu speed. the problem is then playing back and editing the footage if you have a slow processor as it can be very time consuming at best.