Computer setup for capture

[Lexicon]

Hi all, was wondering if i could get some advice on my pc specs. I want to be able to capture live TV succesfully and I have listed below my computer specs. Is my hardware ok to capture tv???

I have researched some info but I am having some trouble trying to fix a high pitched sound which I get doing TV capture. I am using Winfast PVR which came with my capture card and have tried a few other softwares but I still have this sound problem. Also Winfast PVR locks up when capturing after 10 minutes. I would really appreciate any help to fix this.

Operating System: win xp sp2
CPU Speed: 933mhz P3 clocked to 1012mhz
Harddrive space: 40GB Seagate 7200rpm
RAM Memory: 512mb PC 133
Video Card: Nvidia Geforce4 MX4000
Capture Card: Winfast DV2000
Motherboard: Asus CUSL2-C
CD Writer: Matshita CW-7586
DVD Writer: HP 300n
Audio: C-Media CMI8738/C3DX Audio

[ICEMAN.]

Hi,

not easy to say where is the boarder, but your configuration seems to be only able to do low resolution capture.

Do some tests: Get Virtual Dub running, use the Vdub capture tool (File...Capture AVI). In the Capture GUI you can do experiments with the resolution, with the compressor, with audio aso.

Example: I prefer capturing films from TV. I want to capture in full resolution (720x576 Europe) at very good quality. Therefore I have to use MPEG4 V2 at min. compression to have the lowest CPU-load. (And I´m using Athlon XP @3200). Audio is captured in 172kBit/s PCM uncompressed, ALSO BECAUSE OF THE CPU load.

After capturing, I open the file in Vdub, cut out the commercials, and do the real compression in DIVX or XVID and mp3. That doesn´t need to run in realtime.

Maybe this is also an option for you. But I think that you have to reduce the resolution and don´t expect very high quality..

Wolfgang Germany

[gcutler]

I have captured with a 1GHz Pentium 3 with 512MB, using an external Firewire capture device and it works fine capturing NTSC quality AVI. BUT, I also had problems until I turned off most of the resident programs sitting in my system tray to get every ounce out of the CPU (I especially turned off Anti-Virus and Anti-Spyware SW because they are always working in the background, but of course turn them back on when not capturing) .

Looking at your config, your hard drive may be a limitation, how much free space do you have on the 40GB drive? If it is low (I'm guessing that you can probably write off 10GB out of the 40 for the OS and other apps?), Can you add an additional drive and make that dedicated for the video capture.

[dphirschler]

My AMD 1.4 GhZ machine should have been able to capture full frame, but it couldn't unless I compressed it in Picvideo MJPEG (at 18 ). The CPU only had a 20-30% load, but I think the bus speed was the real issue. Some people claim to be able to capture full frame at 700 MHz, and mayber they could, but I could not with twice the speed. BTW, I had a VIA chipset (Asus mobo).

My Pentium 3.0 gHz easily captures full frame uncompressed, using huffy, or picvideo. It has a 800 MHz front side bus. Maybe that is the key. It's a no-name brand mobo.


Darryl

[gcutler]

My Pentium 3.0 gHz easily captures full frame uncompressed, using huffy, or picvideo. It has a 800 MHz front side bus. Maybe that is the key. It's a no-name brand mobo.


Darryl

I've captured uncompressed perfectly with a 2GHz CPU, 400MHz front side bus and never had a problem. There may have been other issues that are the problem than FSB, granted the FSB on my 1GHz machine may not have been the most optimized system either...

[reboot]

Get a hardware encoder card like the Hauppauge PVR-250 and you can cap on a 486

[edDV]

Either hardware encoder (recommended*) or faster CPU/Mobo but >2.4GHz P4 (3.0GHz best) needed for DVD quality MPeg2 capture using software encoder.

*e.g. PVR-250 now, PVR-150 after problems fixed.


PS: Uncompressed is an option. It takes little CPU power during capture, but It takes huge amounts of disk space and then you need a lengthy CPU 100% rendering process later to get the material into DVD or other compressed format. For TV captures, I'd rather do it all in one step.

[Lexicon]

Thanks everyone for the feedback. I have tried some other softwares and now can manage to capture using iuvcr @704 x 576 pal. Today I tossed my sound card as far as I could...and bought a new one which solved the audio problems I was having. My only problem now is getting the audio in sync with the video. I found the Picvideo Mjpeg 3 codec was the best for my low end computer and now capture with no lost frames.

A big thankyou to all.

[nic2k4]

I was capturing 704x480 un-compressed AVI on an Athlon 900 without dropping frames. The key was the Raid HD setup I used, when capturing un-compressed, CPU power is not as important as data transfer rate. This Raid setup used 2 drives with a minimum 25Mb/s transfer rate, the video was being captured at 20Mb/s. The only problem was getting capture software that would automatically split the files at 4Gb.