MY New AIW Radeon 32 DDR

[Macros746]

Hi everyone,
I am awaiting my new card in the mail (upgrading from a Voodoo 3000) and I was wondering how much disk space I should be expecting to use to capture VHS quality to my HD. I would like to burn various TV shows to VCD compliance. Anyone help me out? Any suggestions about best method and needed programs would be appreciated as well. Thanks,

Mark

[cruffino69]

The amount of space you'll need depends on the format of your capture.

If you plan on going straight to MPEG-1 for VCD, then you can plan on about between 650-700MB for 1 hour of capture. Of course, changing the bit rate (i.e. XVCD) will alter this amount.

If you want to capture a VCD-formatted capture to a lossless AVI using something like the Huffyuv codec, expect to use up about 10GB per hour. And as a warning, ATI's MMC won't let you capture more than 2GB at a time (file size limitation). You can always use VirtualDub to get around this by using a spill drive, but you'll have to make sure you have the VfW-WDM wrapper in order to allow VirtualDub to use the AIW.

But speaking of VCD and the ATI AIW, when you use ATI's MMC to capture to MPEG, there are some funny streams (padding and private) in the MPEG file that help players keep audio sync. These streams are not VCD compliant, and if you try to use EZCD to burn a VCD, it'll complain (I don't think Nero will, though). You can easily make the resulting MPEG VCD compliant by using TMPGEnc to demux/mux the file. That'll strip out the extra streams, and actually reduce the overall file size. However, every time I've done this with a capture that has dropped frames the audio will get out of sync (about 33ms for every frame dropped). Let's do some math: 1 hour of show = 107892 frames. 30 frames is less than .03% of this total, but will contribute to 1 second of audio sync after the 30th dropped frame.

Just thought you'd like to know what my experiences are. I have a 1.2GHz Athlon, Radeon 64DDR ViVo, 60GB 7200RPM ATA100 hard drive, 256MB PC-133 CAS2 SDRAM, and am running Win98SE. Everything is plenty fast to keep up with MPEG-1 captures, and I've measured the CPU usage at 20% for a VCD-compatible capture. Even so, every once in a while I get dropped frames. I even make sure nothing else is running on my system. I can't figure it out, and it's annoying as hell. The problem is, it used to work PERFECTLY! I captured 2 straight hours off of a camcorder without a hitch (in fact, I did that 4 times!) Since that time, I've changed my sound card from a Sound Blaster Live! Value to a Santa Cruz, and of course upgraded the ATI drivers. I'm not saying it's definitely one of these, but they are the most likely suspects. I went back to the 7103 drivers from the latest (7189's), and it seemed to help a little, but I could be fooling myself. I'm really guessing that it's the Santa Cruz, but right now I can't afford the time/money to change it out.

The point of all this babble is to make you aware that you can get the ATI to do exactly what you need, but it can be tricky. Use the forums on this site and over at http://www.rage3d.com and I think you'll be pleased. Most imporantly, once you get it working, DON'T MESS WITH IT! Good luck!

[Macros746]

Thanks for the advice. I am excited and full of anticipation of frustration. Just how bad is the direct to VCD quality? And, since I have a Hollywood + card, would it be possible to plug the out into the AIW in and capture from DVD directly to SVCD or VCD? Anyone tried this?


mark

[mikewg]

I have an ATI All in Wonder 32 and capture to AVI using VirtualDub. Just install the MMC 6.3 drivers to get the VFW drivers, search the forums for more info on this.

I have a 60 Gig hard drive which can capture about 6 hours of video. Great for capturing a few nights worth of shows, then editing out the commercials using VirtualDub and converting to VCD format using TMPGEnc.

It's really not difficult, and I recently purchased AVI_IO so I can record different times and different shows while I sleep and while I'm at work. Haven't tried it yet but I'm pretty excited about it.

[cruffino69]

I did some comparisons of various capture methods in terms of quality. My source was a laserdisc via the composite video input (no S-Video out on the LD player ). By far, capturing to a lossless AVI then converting to MPEG with TMPGEnc is the best way to go.

However, given a high quality input signal (I'm not familiar with the quality of the AIW tuner) the MPEG captures are quite reasonable.

For me, capturing to an almost-VCD-compliant MPEG in real time is well worth the loss in quality vs. the amount of time spent on converting an AVI. Unfortunately, this is a judgement you'll have to make for yourself.

One point to note, mikewg's advice about installing MMC 6.3 is slightly incorrect. That version doesn't work with Radeon boards. I'm not sure what software/drivers you'll get with your hardware, but make sure you get the MMC 7.1 and DVD 4.1.0 0 to install. Also, install DirectX. Version 8.1 is out, but I havent't tried it yet (and am somewhat hesitant to do so!) I do know that if you install 8.0a you'll need the "Video Cature Update" as well, though I'm not certain if that patch is included in the 8.1 release.

BTW, if you need the VfW-WDM wrapper, get it here:
http://faq.arstechnica.com/link.php?i=714

This will let VirtualDub see your AIW. I wouldn't get this until you verify that you can't use the AIW with VirtualDub.

Good luck!

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: cruffino69 on 2001-11-16 15:04:31 ]</font>