5 hw and sw questions, please help!

[jeremypps]

hardware: athlon 900 448mb ram quantum 30gb 7200rpm + ibm 40gb 7200rpm (new, still needs to be formatted) ati aiw 128 agp sb 64 pci.

1) is it possible that under win98 capturing at 640x480 I lose no frames while under w2k I lose a lot? same hdd.

2) how can I bypass the 4gb limit problem without using a ntfs? I've seen somebody do this with virtualdub telling it to change file every xxx kb, can anybody please explain how or tell me where to find a guide to do that?

3) what is, for your experience, the best os for capturing, if you think there are differences between them? I've tried w98 and w2k, at a first look w2k seemed better but now I'm not so sure, I still have to try wme and xp but before buying and installing I'd like to have a feeback from experienced users

4) the ati aiw doesn't have an heatsink, do you think it would be helpful and, if somebody installed one, how did you do that?

5) divx codec: hot to configure it to fit 120 min onto 700mb?

many questions, any help would be appreciated, thanks a lot to everybody in advance.

[stanwebber]

what capture software did you use? are you running vfw compatible drivers/mmc under win98? in virtualdub enable multisegment capture and set up a spill drive(s) to bypass 4gb limit. best os for capturing is win98se lite (www.98lite.net)....with xp being released this is likely to change soon as directshow gains more acceptance. btw, winme is still the win98 kernal. i wouldn't bother with a heatsink, but i imagine you'd end up with double-sided thermal tape application

[jeremypps]

thanks stanwebber, thanks a lot.
I used MMC 7.1, actually I'm downloading directx 8.1 and will install them under a new w98 partition with new ati drivers and nothing more, just to try.
I've just formatted my new ibm hdd and tried it but 704x576 avi capture was nearly a disaster, lowering a bit seemed quite good, virtualdub was non working under w98 and .. argh ...
well, too difficult to explain, anyway, thanks a lot again

[stanwebber]

mmc v6.3 is the last to support vfw capture & vfw will never be supported under win2k or xp. newer drivers/mmc require the microsoft wdm/vfw mapper which is buggy as hell(forget about capturing both fields). iuvcr(see tools section left) has wdm support if you want to capture in win2k or xp